Skip to main content

'They left an indelible mark on my psyche': how Daft Punk pushed pop forward

Skrillex, Erol Alkan and those close to the French duo chart how they went from being industry outsiders to defining the trajectory of dance music

Following their split this week after 28 years, Daft Punk have ascended to pop Valhalla. Perhaps they’re sitting next to Prince, whose pirouetting falsetto funk and emotional vulnerability inspired the duo’s 2001 masterpiece Discovery, and Led Zeppelin, from whom they cribbed double-necked guitars and 10-tonne drums on 2005’s Human After All. Yet those albums were met with a mixed reception – audiences and critics alike had to learn to trust Daft Punk’s vision of the future.

For British producer-DJ Erol Alkan, whose fan forums were an essential incubator of the blog house movement that swept through club culture in the 2000s, the Parisians had a “deeply profound impact” on a generation, including Alkan. “They were a gateway into so much music that I love, and a big part of that admiration comes down to their position as outsiders,” he says. Daft Punk’s magpie approach to songwriting and visual art was a dominant story of early 21st-century music, similarly colouring the work of MIA, 2ManyDJs, the Avalanches and other sample-stitchers. Although some commentators queried how much inspiration could actually be bound up in recycling, Alkan thinks that in Daft Punk’s case, “the references are strong and familiar, and there is enough of themselves in there for it to always remain theirs”.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3r1tizB

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...