Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

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

Another random observation:

I love how some writers are describing RAM as "Daft Punk's first album without synthesizers."

And they say hard journalism is dead...

daft punk's first album without non-transparent synthesizers

Another random observation:

I love how some writers are describing RAM as "Daft Punk's first album without synthesizers."

And they say hard journalism is dead...

― Naive Teen Idol, Tuesday, May 14, 2013 9:53 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?!?!

reminds me of when dave marsh reviewed the first steely dan album and said of "do it again," (I paraphrase) "while the hired-gun singer isn't that great, it's remarkable how much he seems to imitate donald fagen's phrasing here."

i sometimes wonder if some music critics even have ears.

daft punk's first brass band album

Daft Punk: Live at the Village Vanguard

I've actually seen it described as their first album with "no electronics except for a modular synthesizer and some vintage vocoders,"

daft punk's first album without non-transparent synthesizers

On other news, "Fragments of Time" isn't totally rocking my world yet. The microsampling is softer and smoother than before. The guitar parts are nice. But Todd's vocal feels a little safe to me -- very straight and lacking a melody that really pulls it across the finish line. Willing to give it a few more listens.

The irony is "Doin' It Right" is this album's "Face to Face," not "Fragments" -- penultimate track, the Daft Punk-ization of a guest's well-worn style. Whatever you think of PB's part, the vocoder bit has a sweetness to it I find irresistible.

"Motherboard" is all kinds of awesome.

did casablancas co-author the song he sings?

b/c it's hard to know if the melody line and the guitar are "homage to the strokes" or "another song written by the guy who co-writes the strokes' songs"

also, it's odd that they hired JC for his vocal stylings (what I figured was the "grain" of his voice) and then obscured them via vocoder -- although a bit of his vocal personality comes through.

i know i said some open-mind things yesterday but i am not enjoying this album

Traitor

So... I loved Fragments of Time and I'm not well versed on Steely Dan but I've seen some of you throwing comparisons itt. Please recommend me some songs by them.

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

All of them. Listen to all of them.

xp to amateurist, idk if casablancas co-wrote that song, but it does sound very strokesy and definitely seems, to me, to be almost as distinctively casablancas as doin' it right is distinctively panda bear.

No! There's too much. Pick three songs for starters. Please?