Switched on Pop - Listening 2 Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

In the song "Touch" from Daft Punk's final studio album, 2013's Random Access Memories, featured artist Paul Williams sings a line that augured the end of an impressive collaboration: "I need something more." With RAM, Daft Punk pulled out all the stops, going the opposite direction of their previous albums, to "give life back to music" and bestow hearts and souls upon their robotic doppelgängers. RAM features almost no samples or programmed digital instruments, instead leaning into extensive collaborations with legendary studio musicians, iconic producers like Nile Rodgers, and modern mavens such as Pharrell. The making of RAM followed the blueprint of classic albums from what Daft Punk called "the golden age" of recording—Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Pink Floyd. The duo spent over a million dollars, held five years of studio sessions, and painstakingly crafted each track. The result was a record that helped usher in a retro disco-funk revival across pop music and generated a smash hit in "Get Lucky." The band had perhaps crafted their magnum opus—but did it also represent the conclusion of their epic narrative of the battle between human and machine? Songs Discussed Daft Punk - Give Life Back to Music Daft Punk - Lose Yourself to Dance (feat. Pharrell Williams) Daft Punk - Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers) Daft Punk - Giorgio by Moroder Eagles - Hotel California Daft Punk - Contact The Sherbs - We Ride Tonight Daft Punk - The Prime Time of Your Life Daft Punk, Paul Williams - Touch (feat. Paul Williams) Thomas Bangalter - Mythologies: X. L'Accouchement Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.

And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, it's the fourth and final installment of listening to Daft Punk, our series hearing past the French duo's public persona to find the deeper narratives of machine age, anxiety, and hope running through their discography. All right, where do we go? Over the series, we've heard Daft Punk wire their robotic circuits on their first album homework, give their automaton's voices on their second album, Discovery, achieve sentience on their third album, Human After All. And now we've reached the final album 2013's Random Access Memories when their robot alter egos finally achieve humanity,

acquiring hearts and souls, but self-destructing in the process. This is great. We're coming full circle. It is the 10th anniversary of Random Access Memories, and this is the place that it all started for us when we used to live right next to each other in the Bay Area, and we would listen to records late into the night.

I remember being so absorbed in listening to every little musical choice that they made on this album. So I'm so excited to revisit it with you 10 years later. Well, let's recreate that experience we had a decade ago, Charlie, by spinning the opening track of Random Access Memories, which I think serves as a thesis statement of sorts for this project. It's called Give Life Back to Music. Okay, Charlie, after a month of listening to Daft Punk,

what strikes you when you listen to the beginning of this album and this song Give Life Back to Music? There couldn't be a grander entrance. It almost has the feeling of like a sports walk-on song. Bum-bum! Like, what's going to happen? You think it's going to go over the top and maybe expecting the hard hitting four to the floor, intense side-chaining rhythms that we know daft punk for.

But instead, everything sort of chills out with these gliding chimes that smoothly take us into a old-school, kind of slow-tempo disco-style beat. When we finally get some lyrics from daft punk after a minute of these textures, they're reinforcing everything you just heard, Charlie. They say, let the music in tonight just turn on the music. Right, let it just glide over you, like the chimes. I feel like we left the last episode about human after all in this in-between space of, are they a robot or are they human?

And it took this really darker turn towards industrial, heavy sounds and distorted rock grooves. And now this is the most human place. that we've ever heard on Daft Punk. These are session musicians pristinely produced, and the only sort of sign of the robots is of course their voice using the vocoder. Yes, I think life is a key term here. Give life back to music in this song.

And Daft Punk told Billboard magazine that one of the motivators for this whole project was their desire to have live drums. Like that was what started this whole. thing was like, we don't want to be programmed drums. We want a live drummer in the room with us. So there's this idea of life as in giving life back to music. And then there's this liveliness of creating a musical experience before your eyes with live musicians. Yeah, the live drums definitely breathe life into this music. It kind of feels like they have

pulled back all of the machinery that they would have used earlier. They would have sampled live drums and then process them, we are removing that layer of sampling from Daft Punk and just getting the source material. And it really works. In every other Daft Punk album, we heard them expertly flip samples, sometimes taking small snippets of recording and transforming it into something completely new. On this album by contrast, there is only one song that features any samples. They're producing an album that sounds like it could have been made in the late 70s, early 80s, like something They would have sampled originally when they were the sample heavy daft punk. But wait, you said there's a sample on this album? I had no idea.

Yes, it's on the final track of the album, Contact. Check out the opening synth melody here. I love that sound. That is a beautiful synthesizer sound. And it's an interpolation of the 1982 track We Ride Tonight by the Sherbs. I don't know this. Oh, yeah. That's the same. Five.

So they still are the robots. It's like you got to end the album with a song called Contact. Like we're going to make Contact as these alien robots. And they are referencing their earlier sampling techniques just to give you a little tip of the hat, tip of the helmet, I guess. And there's actually one other sample on Contact, Charlie. It's a sample that they got directly from NASA of a recording from the Apollo 17 Moon Mission in the 9th. 1970s. Okay, you lied to me. There's two samples. There's one musical sample. I said there's one song that features samples. Okay, that's what I said.

Hey, Bob, I'm looking at what Jack was talking about. It's definitely not a particle as nearby. It is a bright object, and it's obviously rotating because it's flashing. It's way out in the distance, apparently rotating in a very rhythmic fashion, this is like a UFO transmission. I feel like they even chop that sample up because it feels like there's a flow to it. He's speaking in a certain rhythm that is almost approximating song.

I think it's a flex unto itself too. It's like, yeah, here's our original space mission audio that we got direct from NASA. But it reflects something about this album that was different than any others that preceded it. This was an old school record making process. This was something that went down in legendary studios across the United States, something that took five years for them to create, starting in 2008 when they laid the initial tracks for this album, and something which cost a lot of

money over a million dollars is what Tomas Bangalter estimated the cost of the record was to Rolling Stone. This is truly like how they made records back when there were huge album advances that just don't exist like they do today. I feel like you can hear that expense, that time, that care on the lead single from this album, the World Beating Smash, Get Lucky featuring Nile Rogers and Feral. Oh, yeah. This is a song that actually takes its time. It begins with some dazzling fretwork. from Nile Rogers. Nile, the famed music producer from the band Sheik. Only one person on this planet gets to name their guitar, The Hitmaker, and you can hear how everything he plays in that such Nile

style of funk disco playing, it's always a hit. Yeah, I mean, when you've worked with Diana Ross, David Bowie, Duran, Duran, Madonna, then you can call your guitar that. The next element we get are Pharrell Williams vocals. Let's listen to him on the iconic chorus of this song. It's not until three and a half minutes into this song that we hear the element we've been waiting for, the familiar vocoders of daft punk. I mean, there's like a whole song that's gone by, Charlie, before these robot voices enter. When daft punk finally come in, there's a shift and vibe in the song too that's like, hey, we've arrived. Underneath the drum production becomes more gritted and intense and hits harder, kind of like their drums on homework would have.

I think it's also notable that this is one of the first times I feel. feel like we hear daft punk sing a pop song, like a proper pop song. They've got some ballads on Discovery. We've heard them croon in this vocoder of voice before. But even their hits like harder, better, faster, stronger. They're not structured like a top 40 pop hit. And so here I think we're getting a mix of the old robots in the production when they sing, but also new robots in that they are singing like a pop hit that could have come out of the late 70s. There's a moment in this track that illustrates exactly what you're talking about. So we've heard Nile, we've heard Farel,

now we've heard Daph Punk, and then about four minutes into the song, we get to hear them all at once, all of these voices interacting with one another. It collides. That is so classic Daph Punk to introduce different ideas and then collide them all together in this mashup at the end. I think a lot of that interplay also comes from the references that they're using.

We talked about this being a sort of, of classic style of album production. And Daft Punk even said they are reaching back to what they call the golden age of music recording. On their first album, Homework, their song, Teachers, shouts out the electronic music and hip-hop pioneers that they pay homage to. With random access memories, Daft Punk told their collaborator Todd Edwards, they were drawing on a very different set of references.

The Eagles Hotel California, Fleetwood Max, Rumors, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Classic rock. All equally expensive sounding albums, though obviously there's a lot of disco and Nile Rogers' influence, and they've literally brought the guy in to help make this record. It's like the expansive, intimate sound of those classic rock albums merged with the disco rhythms of classic 70s and 80s funk. Yeah. The track Lose Yourself to Dance captures a lot of these influences. It's got this pretty slow tempo.

It's got that Eagles-like soft rock-noodling guitar line. And more chimes, Charlie. So many chimes. And there's that slow, thumping disco groove in the drums. And could I even go out on a limb and say this moment when the vocoder start to sing with one another encounter point? Is a nod to the double guitar solo in the Eagles Hotel, California? Get out of here.

I said it was a stretch. That might be a stretch. But you know what's cool about it? I think it might be the first time that we ever hear two robots singing and counterpoint together. I don't know if we're hearing both Giman and Toma at the same time. But it does feel as though they are creating the feeling of both robots being present in this song, singing and counterpoint with each other. It does feel like random access memories is a high point in Daft Punk's use of the vocoder. And I think they themselves saw it this way.

In an interview with the French magazine Lobes, they talked about their vocoders like this. In an age where human voices are being processed to become robotic, we found it exciting to make a robotic voice as human as possible. They keep playing with the robot human tension. And when we hear vocoders used in this contrapuntal way on Lose Yourself to Dance, it both references classic rock and maybe even older styles of music, like Baroque counterpoint in the style of J.S. Bach, exactly. Right. You had to go there.

They're making an album in the 2010s using technologies of the late 60s and 70s to evoke the idea of like B-movie style, sci-fi, robots who can sing in the style of a Baroque-era choir boy. We're going further back in time rather than going forward. Right. They told Billboard that they were trying to capture the magic of the samples that they had always flipped by doing it themselves. They said it's the studio, the place it was recorded, the performers, the craft, the hardware, recording engineers, mixing engineers, the whole production process of these records that took a lot of effort and time to make back then.

You know what robots don't have to do to create something is use effort and time, right? You said at the beginning of this episode that, like, they are showing that they have a heart and soul, and they're really working this material to make it come alive. And they're not just reaching back to this golden age of recording by going to the same studios and using the same expensive gear. They're actually tapping the musicians who made some of Pop's most classic albums. Those live drums that they prized, they're played by John J.R. Robinson, who laid down the beats on Michael Jackson's off the wall and even went into his attic and dusted off the symbols that he had used on that recording and brought them in to play on Daft Punk's record. There are so many important session musicians on this album, Paul Jackson Jr. on guitar. Also, my favorite pedal steel player of all time, Greg Leitz. Yes, there is pedal steel all over random access members.

memories. But that's an aside that we won't get to explore. Nathan East on bass, who played with Stevie Wonder, among many other luminaries, and Omar Hakeem, another drummer on Random Access Memories, who's played with everyone from Kate Bush to Mariah Carey. And then, in addition to all these famous session musicians that they're bringing in, they also tap as their featured artists, some legendary producers, composers, and musicians. Take the track, Georgio by Maroder. And this track isn't just a panegyric to the great Italian disco producer Giorgio Moroder, who worked with Donna Summer on Love to Love You Baby and many other classic songs. They also brought Maroder into the studio to work with them.

He discovered that they didn't want him to lay down tracks. They wanted him to get on the mic and tell his life story. Yeah. And they did it in a way that speaks to the ridiculous expense of this record because they didn't just have one microphone for Marauder. They had three. One from the 1960s, one from the 1970s, and one from the 2010s. No way.

And they wanted him to use each mic as he narrated the different parts of his life. Now, I love this idea, but Charlie, I have to say, let's listen. And I'd be very curious if you can tell when Georgia O'Ma Roder switches from one mic to the other. I've heard the song many times, and I've never picked it up. Because I was living in a little town, was studying, and when I finally broke away from school and became a musician, I thought, well, now I may have a little bit of a chance. Because all I really wanted to do is music and not only play music, but compose music. At that time in Germany, in 69, 17. You didn't hear any. I don't believe you for a second. There's no discernible difference.

It's a little bit brighter maybe. No, I call VES. I love that they make this little mini documentary about the history of electronic music and this celebration of Giorgio. I think that some people found these moments on random access memories to be kind of kitsch. But it's so fitting for the album, right?

Random access memories is, of course, the acronym RAM, like computer RAM. And so it is the thing that is in memory. And what is in memory for them are all of their teachers. We've heard Daft Punk do this same kind of thing from the very beginning is name-check the people who've influenced them and tell their story through their own interpretation of the music. I think this song is the most daft punk thing they could possibly do.

This human touch that's all over random access memories represent something of a new beginning for daft punk, a new unveiling, a new chapter in their story. But Charlie, we may not have realized this at the time. This was also an ending, perhaps the conclusion and fulfillment of this overarching narrative about the merging of humanity and technology. So after a quick break, I want to listen for the hints that Daft Punk gave in this album that this was the finale of their statement as a duo.

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They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Throughout random access memories, daft punk seem to be telling us we are robots, but we also have hearts and souls. We have these beating hearts that are the bass drums on this album, recorded live in studios that resonate from beginning to end.

These are the soulful vocals that we're giving you on our vocoders. You can really hear this emphasis on humanity in the song, Touch. which features these vulnerable vocals by Paul Williams. Touch, I remember touch. Pictures came with touch. A painter in my mind. Paul Williams, I know as a songwriter and artists, he wrote a lot of important 70s songs,

like an old-fashioned love song. We've only just begun. Rainy Days and Mondays, Rainbow Connection. He also acted in and wrote the score for the 1970s movie musical Phantom of the Paradise, a camp classic that happens to be the source of Daff Punk's inspiration for their robot helmets. No way. So this is a very full circle moment for the band. I hadn't known that.

This is once again Daph Punk doing a teacher's kind of moment. showing their influences, making music with Paul Williams, who's also connected to the source of the robot's helmets. And of course, rather than make like a hard-hitting forward-to-the-floor electro track, they make a song called Touch to emphasize, as you pointed out, the humanity underneath these robot identities. Gimann actually told Pitchfork that Touch is like the core of the record and the memories of the other tracks are revolving around it.

And on this epic eight-meas, minute plus track, they give so many hints that they are achieving full humanity and perhaps in the process coming to the close of this daft punk era. For one thing, Charles, remember when we were listening to Human after all last week? Yeah. And you pointed out on the track prime time of your life. They do this really awesome technique where they speed up the track higher and higher, faster and faster to give you the sense of anxiety that your life is sort of spinning out of control and that you're aging and perhaps that as robots they have planned obsolescence and they're one day going to die oh this is stressful charlie it's like they're getting sucked into a black hole it's getting so

fast that it's like unintelligible pure noise it sounds like an engine and then it just oh ends on touch they do the opposite. They slow everything down. We're in this ecstatic, improvisatory, instrumental moment. New Orleans jazz. And then just as it peaks, everything comes crawling to a slowdown. Very space oddity, David Bowie vibe here.

And here are Daff Punk's vocoder voices again telling us to hold on. If we heard a certain robotic anxiety in human after all, prime time of your life, I feel like this is acceptance. This is like, my batteries are draining. I'm losing my life force. Yeah. And it's okay because love is the answer. And this robotic body may die, but maybe my soul will live on.

You know, it's not the only song that they use this technique of slowing things down on the album to great. musical effect. They actually did the same thing at the end of Giorgio as well. Another, like, eight-minute long song. Really drawing it out there. They're showing off also a great psychoacoustic trick, which is that as a tone slows down, it becomes just a beating pulse. The opposite had happened in prime time of your life. As the song sped up, you lost any sense of rhythm, and it kind of just became this really intense distorted sound. When you slow it all the way down, it just becomes a boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. A heartbeat, perhaps.

Underneath every synthesized sound is a heartbeat. Well, that's cool, Chuck, because on touch, they do the same kind of uncovering of humanity. I mean, this track features the classic symbol of innocence, a children's choir. It's almost like the robots have gotten into their pyramid spaceship and they're launching off into space and leaving behind the next generation, which is this singing choir of children. But just as quickly as they introduce this choir, they cut it off. Check out what happens towards the end of the song. There's this abrupt stop. That was not me accidentally stopping the recording. That was a really unexpected cutoff. Yeah, it's kind of like someone pulled out their circuit board and the robots just ceased to operate. You're out of time. That's it. You're out of choose.

But Charles, we get one more message at the end of this song from Paul Williams. Touch, sweet touch, you've given me too much to feel. Sweet touch. You've almost convinced me I'm real. They keep leading into this human robot dichotomy. There's nothing more human than a single voice and a piano asking to connect via touch. But then they're like, you almost convinced me I'm real. Are these robots actually human?

Have they taken over? Paul Williams? What is going on, Nate? With the benefit of hindsight, Charlie, I think we can hear random access memories as the final nail in the coffin. of these robot persona. And just recently, Toma Bong Alter seemed to confirm this. He told the BBC, the last thing I would want to be in the world we live in in 2023 is a robot. He's invoking this paradigm shift that I think we've had in just the last couple of years about what it means to be human.

Forever the idea of self-awareness has been about higher intelligence and all of the unique capacities that the human mind has. And as real AI has come around to show us that actually it's not so hard to do a lot of human processing, more and more people are invoking the most human parts of us are our emotions. Our humanity is not necessarily based on our intelligence, but it's based off of our feelings. Clearly for Daft Punk, their feeling is we want to reconnect with what makes us human. Yeah. And I think it's telling that Bong Alter's latest solo project, is a ballet score called mythologies that is completely instrumental,

scored for the most classic ensemble of a symphony orchestra, and there's not a single sample or vocoder or synthesizer to be found. His orchestral works, though, of course, feel like a continuation of the latter half of Daft Punk's career when they scored the film Tron, which had a full orchestration. I know they worked with an arranger in collaboration on that album, but they also had many times full string sections on random access memories. So there is a throughline from daft punk to Tomah just being himself making this most human organic music. I think if after listening to every daft punk album and tracing this journey of man and machine, our conclusion at the end was that daft punk is saying, okay, destroy all the robots, kill artificial intelligence, you know, eliminate technology.

That would not be the takeaway here, I think. No, no, no, I don't think so. It seems to be more about a sentiment captured in a line from touch. I need something more. I need something more. Paul Williams sings, I need something more. How can technology make us more human, connect us to those. emotional depths that you were talking about, allows to form communities, like the tens of thousands

of people who gathered for Daft Punk's epic live tour in 2007, the people singing along to around the world, the musicians that Daft Punk gather for these collaborative efforts, that's what these albums are about, Charlie. Yeah, and you're saying that on our random access memories, we're getting all kinds of foreshadowing that this is the direction that they're going in. We should know it by the kinds of orchestration that they're using in the music. We can hear it by the soulful kind of singing in the rare moments that they're using electronics, like the vocoder. We are hearing the end of daft punk before we even know it. And to make sure there was no ambiguity in 2021, Daft Punk released a video called Epilog that was scored to the same song we were just listening to,

touch off random access memories, which represented the end of their robot partnership and visualizes one of the robots blowing up in the desert and the other one walking into the sunset. The robot explodes into a million pieces about four times. It's almost like the ending of a John Wayne Western. I remember being so sad when this happened because I love the music of daft punk, and I was just thinking, how is it that we will never get more music by these robots?

But having listened to daft punk now in all of their studio albums, it makes me realize that there was no way that they could have continued this ongoing 20-year artistic project of being these half-human, half-machine robot characters, because their representation of a robot is based off of this anachronism, This idea of like sylons from Battlestar Galactica. You know, 60s and 70s, sci-fi. And today we live in an era where we have robots that sound like humans.

There are robots that can walk on two feet and do human tasks. There are these giant, large language models that people fear are going to become superintelligence and surpass us. Their vision of a robot exhibits a different kind of thing. fear over the machine, something that is maybe going to displace human labor. And now we think about all of our fear of artificial intelligence has taken on a whole new set of meaning. There's no way that they could continue without being completely kitsch. That's something that struck me as we've listened to Daft Punk's four studio albums and their live album with Rihanna last week, Charlie. the surprising relevance of this multi-decade musical arc.

So if you're ever feeling overwhelmed or freaked out by the head-spinning speed of developments in AI and robotics, maybe you can go listen to the daft punk catalog and spend some time with a pair of musicians who have been considering the highs and the lows, the possibilities and the fears of our machine age for over two decades. Like, this is the music that speaks to our modern moment.

Yeah, daf bunk lay out the most important question of today. Are we human or are we robot? Switched on Pop is produced by Rana Cruz, engineered by Brandon McFarland, edited by Art Chung, music by Marcus Thorne Begala, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr. Our executive producer is Nishak Kerwa, our member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. We'd love to hear about your favorite moments on random access memories at Switched on Pop on Instagram and Twitter. And you can find more episodes of our show at our website Switchedonpop.com or anywhere you listen to podcasts. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

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