Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

UKers who pre-ordered the vinyl - has yours arrived yet? Mine hasn't :(

I don't think I've ever recovered my respect for his taste since he said Let England Shake was PJ Harvey's worst album.

I didn't know that, I stopped reading him when he begged people for money to buy a new hard drive.

lol

I googled that. Jesus. Hard times.

I didn't know that, I stopped reading him when he begged people for money to buy a new hard drive.

Oh shit, totally forgot about this. OK, not totally, but enough that I couldn't figure out why just seeing his byline made me giggle.

“Lose Yourself to Dance”, on the other hand, is OK, but plodding, perhaps the weakest song on the record and a good example of the potential pitfalls of Daft Punk’s backward-looking approach

GTFO P4K

"This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?" It's an intriguing thought.

haven't read the sfj piece yet but out of context: no

the boat OTM

Seriously, there's so many things wrong with that one sentence. Calling Daft Punk's approach "backward-looking" alone is a travesty. Using musical styles that have been long around does not equate to "backward-looking". If anything this is a very forward-thinking, futuristic record.

This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?

oh come on. he's too smart to coyly pretend there is any such thing ("good", i mean really). he's just saying that music can succeed on its own terms and still seem awful to him. which should be obvious enough to go without saying.

"nostalgia on shuffle" as described by someone upthread (sorry, can't remember who and it's beneath the cut) does seem accurate though - "backward-looking" is just a harsher way of saying the same thing

The disco perfection of that song is echoed in the opening track, “Give Music Back to Life,”

and this is the new yorker, right? fact checking cuz to the world?

xp - yeah, though i love the album, i can buy backward-looking, even as a criticism

as for the marketing stuff - i wasn't online this weekend, just catching up - it's only music that gets perennially praised so unreservedly for its PR wizardry! no one has said "oh but the great gatsby film was so well marketed, everyone's talking about it" and no one says it about idk innocent smoothies either. people queue up to hate on innocent's marketing (rightly so) and to slag off the great gatsby as a work of art

"This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?" It's an intriguing thought.

this is a horrible sentence for any writer to file and in fact a complete non-thought, though

an even more accurate description than "nostalgia on shuffle" might be "random access memories"

haha but random is the absolute last thing this album is

it's like shuffle but not random

think about it

and they're robots get it

wait is RAM actually random? cos wtf

glad we're finally getting to the bottom of this

I think what lex is trying to get at here is that computers can't truly generate randomness

in this context (RAM as in computer memory = "random access memory") it means you can access data ("memories") in any order you want, immediately, smooshing it against other totally disassociated data if you like, rather than having to proceed chronologically through the entire memory record in order to get to the stuff you're interested in. it's actually a pretty clever title! cuz also robots.

Nostalgia On Shuffle ft. Lou Sayer.

I am relieved to find out that RAM isn't actually random anymore but the name has stuck, so Daft Punk otm

sometimes i think people don't actually realise they're not robots

god robots are boring

"This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?" It's an intriguing thought.

Where to begin...maybe I'm wrong but the best music is usually non cerebral...

Ps thank god you can't post when other comments have been posted cos it gave me a chance to edit what I was gonna say...

robots are boning

. . . to this record! *winks*

hmmm if humans made this record and not robots that changes my opinion kinda

sorta feel ripped off

If you're not willing to believe they're really robots you're not really giving this record a chance Lex

surrender to the robots

(reminds me of the Dracula puppet theater musical at the end of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall", honestly)

haha yes! also agree with the "nastiness" bit, now that you've clarified it. i'll admit that that's sorta how i felt listening to kaputt, too, at first. i know, i know, different musical eras/nostalgia, but the anxiety was similar.

i don't get the 'nastiness' thing at all, nastiness to me implies that there's some sort of subversion of the source material going on and i don't hear that at all here

nothing but love on this album

once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being correct you can do whatever you want

_"This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?"_

First, take this argument at face value, I think music does need to be good. For me, this is the debate "Touch" sets off: "Is this song brilliant or hideous?" I'm not sure I've listened to it enough just yet to judge...but while there are aspects of it that I admire greatly, I'm actually inclined to say "hideous." There's just something about the aesthetic of it -- Williams' old man croak, the hoary Hollywood big band middle 8, the very concept of "Touch"...ick -- that screams awful.

That said, I'm psyched that they included this song here -- and admire that at a moment when opinions have largely been rendered meaningless because there is no consequence to taking a position, DP are consciously trying to provoke these kinds of debates again in a way that you can't with a self-financed record you make at home on your laptop.

That's why I think the bigger (and much more radical) question is whether music needs to be good to sell.

By making this a BIG POP RECORD released by a BIG POP LABEL, it actually does matter whether stuff like Touch and Giorgio By Moroder is listenable and whether people like it. Because if it isn't and they don't, people won't buy it and the Columbias of the world aren't going to finance them again. And based on everything I've read so far, I don't think it's a stretch to assume that Thomas and Guy really did want to use RAM to test whether big productions with stars and sessions musicians in expensive studios with expensive promotional campaigns is the magic itself or simply a vessel for delivering it -- or if this whole idea of "magic" is just a mirage at the end of the day. And frankly, we aren't going to know until at least the end of the summer.

As a result, I appreciate what DP are trying to do as a rule here--nobody else is really trying to pull something like this off--even if I might not always admire the music itself.

Or maybe I do, I don't know.

maybe the issue is that "good" is totally subjective

because hey! people are listening to these tracks and liking them

good music needs to be good or else it isn't good, duh

joking aside, isn't this just the "guilty pleasures" debate all over again?

i dunno what it is, i don't really get why grown-ups are dismissive about whole swathes of sound or genre in 2013

lady gaga totally would have made a song like touch. same with kanye. they don't care either. and they have lots of money. sell lots of records. actually laday gaga duet with paul williams would be grand. she just cover the song.

There's just something about the aesthetic of it -- Williams' old man croak, the hoary Hollywood big band middle 8, the very concept of "Touch"...ick -- that screams awful.

"nostalgia on shuffle" as described by someone upthread (sorry, can't remember who and it's beneath the cut) does seem accurate though - "backward-looking" is just a harsher way of saying the same thing

― flamenco drop (lex pretend), maandag 20 mei 2013 18:45 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The record doesn't strike me as nostalgic at all. They didn't try to emulate sound or feelings from a past, rather they borrowed from the past to create something new and fresh. Like most artists do tbh, but I cannot see RAM as nostalgic music.

I can't RAM as anything but nostalgic music

meanwhile, Glee-pop is everywhere. who the hell even blinks hearing a song like touch? its not that weird.

Different strokes then etc

xp

people are always trotting out old decrepit people like tom jones and marianne faithful.

this album seems very conceptually "french" and i think some of that stuff doesn't translate very well