Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

Get a gig at Pitchfork or SPIN.

xpost

I like Phantom of the Paradise a lot, just on a visual level, but it is amazing how shitty all the music is

xxxp

i think its more about clusters of associations collapsing into one another rather than lines of rehabilitation or w/e, i mean you must recognize how embarrassing the concept is you put it in quotation marks yrself, but i think theres a kind reinvention by association as things are kinda venn diagramming themselves into and out of existence

but i dont really understand who you are even talking about here in terms of like, 'are daft punk making paul williams cool' or w/e - hes already actually p cool cuz of that de palma movie, most of the stuff they're referencing that i can see is/was p cool already or hip or w/e

and I am a big Paul Williams stan

xp

Hall and Oates were always awesome. Mariah and Whitney not so much.

Anyway, lets take our heads out of our posteriors for a moment to talk about how fucking weird and nonsensical some of this sounds. Has anyone who is talking about what a "big hit" this record is destined to be for the kids and Boomers at dinner parties realized that the third track has some dude with a German accent rambling about click tracks and 24-tracks over it in a decidedly non-musical way?

i think we are maybe saying something very similar?

in broad terms yes, but your formulation implies people are concerned to know the answer to the question "is it okay to like this", whereas I think that's only the case sometimes.

Lamp's "clusters of associations collapsing into one another" is a good description. Much of what motivates people to check out X is saying it referred to in connection with Y which they already like. It goes from being off the radar to on, rather than from the bad books to the good books.

seeing it referred to in connection with Y, I mean.

so. many. xposts.

have to say that my tastes were formed in part by noting what genres of music sold for cheaper (hence, weren't that popular among hipsters) in the 1990s/2000s.... classical music, country, a lot of african music before that stuff got huge in american beardo circles.... all very cheap at reckless records in chicago. hence i bought it. during college i often felt that i was kind of step ahead of these revivals b/c I would just buy stuff that looked intriguing/was cheap. i'm sure this is a pretty common dynamic and i wouldn't doubt it drives some of the trends i'm suggesting here.

lamp: re. paul williams yeah there's been a phantom/paradise revival over last few years. but i'm guessing the daft punk record will expose him/it to more people than are attending revival screenings at the cinefamily or whatever.

xpost

yeah the paul williams track is nothing if not deeply weird

wait i need to revise that. i just meant to imply that if reckless was pricing certain genres way down it's because they didn't sell as well or as dependably. but i think the word "hipster" just confuses things here. there are going to be people who come into reckless to buy the hot new indie record and those who may pick that up but may also buy a bunch of cheap LPs and CDs. or people (like me) who just do the latter. i don't think "hipster" adequately distinguishes between (or encompasses) these categories.

"is it okay to like this" is kind of answered by the whole venn diagram stuff, though, no? i don't mean that people are explicitly asking that question, just that often something that is already kind of _around_ gets picked up with enthusiasm because it is not just congruent with but explicitly called out by some band or magazine or something that already meets with general approval in whatever taste culture you are part of.

Yeah I'd agree with that way of putting it.

"Instant Crush" threw me off at first but I keep coming back to it, the synths sound so so good

Imagine Touch sung by Scott Walker.

slightly relevant to tim/amateurist's discussion - this spin piece on how daft punk themselves became cool to like again

http://www.spin.com/articles/daft-punk-human-after-all-random-access-memories-transformation/?slide=1

it's useful to have it all laid out there, but it seems incomplete without acknowledging the role of PR

Get Lucky full-length feels like a 12".

daft punk have been nothing if not PR geniuses in recent years.

I refuse to get drawn into this beardo debate and will instead provide random observations about the songs on my commute home.

i feel like a lot of these songs have much more discernable "movements" than all but a few previous DP tracks

like "oh, here's where this part ends and this part ends" (thinking in partic. of touch and motherboard)

in a way it's kind of bothersome if you were expecting more of a groove records

there's a danger in treating the "clusters of association" or "lines of rehabilitation" as purely happenstance - of course they can be and are to an extent but the role of PR in then working those angles and positions and creating those clusters is rarely discussed

i don't think anyone is discounting PR

but there's often a way in which record label PR often follows from an initial spark of renewed enthusiasm

even at a very niche level, drag city will reissue some private-press LP -after- it's already been hyped/downloaded on some muso LP blog

my digging into any sort of genre that's new to me usually begins not from press that i read or reissue press notices or the 'hipster okay nod' (i tend to tune those out for whatever reason) but when i hear something i really love and find out it's, idk, bob james or michel legrand or gabor szabo or june tabor or the roches or billie jo spears or gene page. from there i read up on where to go next.

She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Album Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre

this is somewhat accurate btw (there is one other non-rock artist in top ten though)

Artist Certified Units in Millions
BEATLES, THE 177
PRESLEY, ELVIS 134.5
BROOKS, GARTH 128
LED ZEPPELIN 111.5
EAGLES 100
JOEL, BILLY 81.5
PINK FLOYD 74.5
JOHN, ELTON 72
STREISAND, BARBRA 71.5
AC/DC 71.5

next top selling female artists are madonna and mariah neck and neck at 16 and 17. tying this back in to the thread (sorta) here's streisand doing the first recording of a fagen/becker song, before they formed steely dan, fagen plays on it also.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6eonE_qF08

yeah the Becker/Fagen stuff is interesting.

I just went to the link from her wiki article and the wiki page has Shania Twain listed (way) ahead of her with Come On Over. but maybe that is just individual album sales, not aggregate...? I dunno

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_in_the_United_States

like balls how is MJ not in your list there, that just seems crazy

MJ didn't release a lot of albums!

His only ridiculous seller in the States is Thriller.

it's from the riaa site. also top selling artists /= top selling albums. mj's 11 fwiw.

http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinum.php?content_selector=top-selling-artists

after Thriller his sales level off at perfectly normal superstar quantities until the late nineties

there's a danger in treating the "clusters of association" or "lines of rehabilitation" as purely happenstance - of course they can be and are to an extent but the role of PR in then working those angles and positions and creating those clusters is rarely discussed

i think there is something kind of inexplicable about these things at a base level tho - like why every chic dirtbag chick is dressing like courtney love ca. 1995 or how 'goodtime charlie's got the blues' became something you here out a lot, i mean i sometimes things will be tied to stuff going on the larger culture (where pr def plays a role in shaping the conversation) but often it seems to happen the other way around, objects in space or w/e, those lawerence weiner taglines stuttering

i also think its a mistake to use 'cool' and 'popular' interchangeably i guess and i was trying to understand amateurist on the former rather than the latter so

I agree that PR is basically reactive w/r/t broader trends - they're more likely to play a key role on an individual artist/album/song level. IMO basically the biggest compliment you can pay PR (in terms of its discursive framing rather than just the brute strategy of e.g. iTunes streams) is that it has correctly judged the (existing) mood.

starting to think maybe one problem w/ the album isn't too many collabs but too few - if you're gonna make a quincy album make a fucking quincy album. get siedah garrett on that shit. older, wetter, slower, longer, our work is never over.

hell Tevin Campbell isn't doing much and El Debarge can use the gig

The album version of "Get Lucky" feels a lot moodier to me. The single remix has such a triumphant arc; the extended version is more like being stuck in some sort of Groundhog Day of being up all night to get lucky every night, until you become a sad robot.

couldn't get access to happy robots borad

Daft Punk guys are pretty much my age, which makes me think they're trolling all the young fans who had dads playing Return to Forever at home and moms listening to smooth jazz funk while driving carpools to soccer games.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, May 14, 2013 1:34 PM Bookmark

Ha no, I love all that shit. But as others have said it's pretty rehabilitated and most Daft Punk fans probably didn't not have all the 70s fusion records on the family turntable that we did. I totally understand why some people hate this album but it's completely in my wheelhouse.

― The Reverend, Tuesday, May 14, 2013 3:12 PM Bookmark

errr, that was supposed to say it's never really been rehabilitated

http://i.imgur.com/SoYVnsF.png

xxxpost: Yeah, the single version of Get Lucky feels more tight. Same thing with Lose Yourself to Dance, I love how it sounds but it could really use an edit. Thankfully it's been confirmed as the second single so we're going to get an edit of that one too.

Still not lucky.

http://i.imgur.com/R66SxkP.jpg

So not gonna happen

Is that Thomas Mars second from the left?

Looks like him!

pretty sure that's Busy P

I think you're right. Shame.

https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/129730596/2630509441_944a6ee3e2_m.jpg

@Umaihr "The meaning of life? Read books. Fall in love. Read all books. Listen to Daft Punk."

Oh so hey, BTW, we all know where Daft Punk got their name from but I finally confirmed who actually wrote it:

http://nedraggett.tumblr.com/post/50466658963/and-why-you-ask-am-i-showing-you-this-photo-of-a

Touch has somehow become one of my favorite tracks on this.

xxxpost: It's Busy P.

kind of disorienting seeing pharrell performing on live tv with robin thicke and t.i. tonight