Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

http://deadgirlfriends.tumblr.com/post/51711791274/this-is-a-quote-from-a-philip-sherburne-piece-on

I will be shocked if Get Lucky is this summer's song -- it sounds like a cover of itself by a really tight wedding band.

Summer songs are the MOST played tracks at wedding receptions.

god that deadgirlfriends post is full of the dumbest most enraging shit.

it’s similar to the way i feel when synth dudes or guitar dudes start going on about amps or tone or about how even different synthesizers that are the same model from the same year still have tiny barely perceptible differences. does anyone care about that kind of stuff?

like this. fuck this bullshit. "ohhhhh my god it's so BORING when artists care about their art" well maybe their art isn't about you!!!

he's the guy from elite gymnastics right? im a lil sympathetic but I think that piece misses the mark - why subject daft punk to that scrutiny and in the same breath extol major label pop artists. i know he's into k-pop. why do you hold daft punks money against them and not kanyes or taylors?

b/c of the PR campaign about daft punk

yeah this album has been specifically framed as digital robot sample-loop ppl attempt REAL music in REAL studios with REAL musicians blah blah blah

i deal with gear fetishization a lot in photography and i understand the narc of small d component but otoh if an artist achieves amazing results hell yeah im interested in knowing how he got em.

RAM is probably the best sounding album from a production / audiophile standpoint released in forever and i think that justifies the nerdy inquiry into which session musicians they tapped and what kind of synths they used.

why isn't this dude out here screaming at the knife for inventing instruments to be used on shaking the habitual, that was part of their pr campaign too

yeah and Jurassic Park was specifically framed as a breakthrough in CGI technology, but you don't hear people complaining that too much went into making the glass of water shake. "Why should I watch a Spielberg movie when I can't make one on my iPhone???"

yah youre allowed to admire and enjoy art that was made with real money without compromising any of your 'principles', miss me with that bullshit please

i mean idk why he wasnt yelling at the knife. also i dont think the argument is "dont watch speilberg" or "dont listen to daft punk" its like... be aware of the material conditions that allow musicians to be gearheads

it is but he makes it in a shitty and dissembling way, tells us multiple times its not abt class or money or he's not attacking the creative choice to bring in session musicians but the piece circles back when it talks about the 'tools' they use and links it explicitly with money and then goes into the economic realities of choosing tools and blah blah blah he's not really being honest w himself at all

In the old days lots of non-1%er acts got access to all those "tools" through something called a record label advance.

Does every blogger need to inject a 'like' into every odd sentence to let the reader know his wheels are turning?

otm

i think that if i were writing that piece for him it's not the tools that make me uncomfortable but the linking of musicianship & virtuosity w money by hiring these session musicians at tens of thousand of dollars an hour, that's the fuck you move that is not available to indie dudes like him

also afaict p4k et al still cover a majority of bands who record relatively cheaply, i don't think animal collective are rushing to hire jr robinson

like is whatever the problem is kind of

i think that if i were writing that piece for him it's not the tools that make me uncomfortable but the linking of musicianship & virtuosity w money by hiring these session musicians at tens of thousand of dollars an hour

I don't follow what's even slightly wrong with this.

there's nothing wrong with it imo but i am trying to sharpen his argument by putting myself in his shoes

like is just a tic; kind of is cowardice

what about sort of

fwiw, one of the arguments I have always made in defense of the old label system is that they give wider access to those kinds of expensive musicians/studios/gear

ive been trying to shed the faux naïf bloggy voice myself but its hard

like really kind of sort of difficult or w/e

i think there's a really solid couple of paragraphs in that piece. i'm still figuring out to what extent i agree with it, but it's definitely one of the more interesting things i've read about RAM.

(part of the reason i'm still figuring it out is, whether it's an affectation or laziness, his writing style, combined with no caps, no line spacing presentation, is like a big "fuck you" to the reader when extended over more than a paragraph.)

me too xp

"Get Lucky" enters the Billboard top five. Airplay is just starting to explode.

that piece is unreadable and i like this album but a lot of that stuff is p worth keeping in mind. it's only when he starts imagining daft punk's motives in hiring nile rogers as being smug and hostile instead of just kids/toystore that he actually kind of loses me a little or whatever.

maybe marissa Mayer will make tumblr implement a faux naïf bloggy voice filter

i know it looks like i am abusing the word unreadable here but really i'm just thinking of myself as a masochistic outlier.

fwiw i got through it via http://www.readability.com/articles/pgmo8gvl

haha i just noticed i typed "p worth keeping in mind." i tried to fucking hide it!

Thing is that when Daft Punk set up those oppositions they're setting themselves up against people like Deadmau5 and Skrillex who have fuckloads of money and could easily make a very expensive album if they need be.

xxp haha

also, re the knife, this was one of the better subgrafs i thought, on the subject of swedish arts council grants:

fans of the various strains of winning, hi-fi indie pop that sweden exports to the rest of the world often like to wonder aloud about what the secret to the swedish sound is, about whether they put something different in the water over there. the secret is almost certainly just money.

My biggest problem with the "getting back to real music" stuff is that nothing on RAM touches the songwriting sophistication or melodicism of the artists they're paying sonic tribute to. Which isn't to say the tracks don't work well, but Daft Punk are pretty minimalist as composers, and in a way their use of "real" instruments just makes that stand out to me more and produces a slightly less satisfying result.

lets be real here the only cause for concern is that daft punk are public rockists

I couldn't help but wonder if Bangalter is taking the piss a bit. Otherwise it just seems like they're massively wrong about their own work. No one brings more "soul" to electronics than they do.

they're just bored with ppl phoning it in

Specifically the people with tons of money who are phoning it in

xp That blog is crap. Firstly Daft Punk have never denied that they're extremely lucky to have the funds to make an album like this:

"We feel fortunate to be able to experiment on a large scale. There's a lot of experimentation now in alternative music, but it feels like there's no money. The people with the means to be ambitious are usually the ones who are experimenting less."

I don't know how you can begrudge a band for spending $1m of their own money on making a great-sounding record unless you're dumb enough to think that they have contempt for anyone who has to work with less. And this is not a useful simplification: "much of the art that has been the most impactful on me, the most meaningful, has been art that was made by people with limited means." Well good for him. I like the Slits and EPMD but I also like Thriller and Rumours. Let's not fetishise the DIY and read all expensive music as "ha ha fuck the poor". If you look at the pyramid on the 2007 tour and can only think "I wonder how much these privileged bastards spent" instead of "wow, I'm glad they went to so much effort to make this show original and fun" then I feel bad for you.

My biggest problem with the "getting back to real music" stuff is that nothing on RAM touches the songwriting sophistication or melodicism of the artists they're paying sonic tribute to. Which isn't to say the tracks don't work well, but Daft Punk are pretty minimalist as composers, and in a way their use of "real" instruments just makes that stand out to me more and produces a slightly less satisfying result.

― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Thursday, May 30, 2013 8:57 AM (22 minutes ago)

"Touch" dude...

xp That blog is crap.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/05/24/blog_post_vs_blog_this_blog_post_is_not_a_blog.html

I stand corrected. That blog post is crap.

I'm pretty sure the rest of that blog is crap as well.

ugh

deadgirlfriends post is on-point

yeah well i decided this record deserved a dedicated cartridge
http://i.imgur.com/XCvkrXfl.jpg
now it sounds perfect

deadgirlfriend's post reads as if his friends and parents ask him why he didn't make RAM at casual parties. Or that people will now expect him to make a RAM-like album next because RAM exists. So Daft Punk is fucking with his fans' expectations and it's Daft Punk's fault.

It is a mischaracterization of Daft Punk's intentions and fans' expectations.