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- [00:07]
Cole Kushner
From the Ringer Podcast Network. This is Dissect. Long form musical analysis broken into short digestible episodes. Today we conclude our season long 12 episode deep dive into Daft Punk's entire career. I'm your host Cole Kushner.
- [00:31]
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- [01:10]
Cole Kushner
Welcome everyone to the season finale of dissect season 14. Before we get started, I wanted to take a quick moment to thank you for listening. I've been making this show for nearly 10 years now, and I've only been able to do it this long because of people like you doing the very thing this show tries to honor. Truly listening. So thank you and if you've made it this far into the season, I can safely assume you've been enjoying it. And if that's the case, one of the best ways you can support the show is simply by telling a friend or sharing it on social media. Leaving a five star review on Spotify also helps. And if you haven't already, you can also check out our back catalog of full seasons on artists like Radiohead, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, and a ton of others. Alright, so that's enough preamble. Let's get back into Daft Punk's Random Access memories. We ended our last episode with an analysis of Touch, the epic eight minute masterpiece Daft Punk described as the core of the album. The song all the others orbit around, and after breaking it down, we understood exactly why they considered it that Structurally Divided in half, Touch contains the complete story and thesis of the album. We hear a robot awakened by a memory or fantasy of sensation and emotion, an experience that throws it into an existential identity crisis, leaving it yearning to become something more than it is, yearning to become human. In the song's second half, a refrain emerges as the answer to the robot's search. If love is the answer, you're home. It's a revelation elevated exponentially by the music surrounding it, as children's choirs, orchestral strings and synthesizers merge into one transcendent musical experience. Daft Punk's ultimate vision of technology and humanity existing together in harmony. After such a definitive emotional and thematic climax, we wondered last episode how random Access memories could possibly continue. Well, to answer that, it helps to turn to film theory and one of the most common story structures in the Hero's Journey. Specifically, we're looking at what's often called the midpoint or the ordeal. This is the moment halfway through a story where the protagonist undergoes some kind of symbolic death and rebirth, an event that fundamentally alters the trajectory of their journey. Up to this point, the character is usually reactive, lost, uncertain, and struggling to understand themselves or the world around them. But after the ordeal or midpoint, a revelation or transformation occurs that gives the character new clarity, pushing them into a more active pursuit of what they truly need. And when we look at Touch through this lens, its placement and structure begin to make even more sense. Recall that when Daft Punk first explained the concept of the song to Paul Williams, they described it as being about an unidentified entity awakening from an unconscious state, something akin to a life after death experience. The song literally begins with our robotic protagonist emerging into consciousness after being jolted awake by fragmented memories of sensation and human connection. From there, the entire first half of the song unfolds like an ordeal in the truest sense of the word. The robot is forced to confront the emptiness and incompleteness of its existence as its longing for touch becomes impossible to ignore. Those feelings culminate in the album's central if love is the answer, you're home, a vision in which the robot finally discovers the thing it's been searching for all along. And yet, despite arriving at that revelation, the song doesn't actually end in resolution. Because after experiencing that transcendent vision of humanity, the robot ultimately returns to isolation. The memory fades, the portal closes, and what's left in the outro is longing, a painful awareness that there is still something more beyond its reach. Touch, sweet touch, you've given me too
- [05:11]
Paul Williams
much to feel Sweet touch, you've almost convinced me I'm real I need something
- [05:23]
Cole Kushner
more, I need something
- [05:28]
Todd Edwards
more.
- [05:32]
Cole Kushner
The lack of harmonic resolution in this outro mirrors the lack of resolution within our protagonist itself. The robot is still yearning for something more, and the remainder of the album will find it continuing that pursuit. But importantly, it will soon become clear that the nature of its pursuit has fundamentally changed. The robot will no longer merely react to its emotional emptiness, nor remain trapped in the mournful paralysis of songs like the Game of Love Within, Instant Crush, and even Parts of Touch. Now it begins actively moving toward transcendence, embracing humanity through dance, before ultimately ascending into another plane entirely by the album's end. And fittingly, the very next thing we hear on the album is a direct acknowledgement that we've crossed into a new phase of the journey, because the first image presented on the next song is the Phoenix, the mythical bird that dies and is reborn from its own ashes, a long standing symbol of transformation and and the beginning of a new cycle after destruction.
- [06:36]
Pharrell Williams
Like the legend of the Phoenix, all ends with beginnings,
- [06:44]
Cole Kushner
Daft Punk's Get Lucky became such a massive cultural phenomenon that it can be difficult to hear it today as part of Random Access Memory's larger narrative. But that's exactly what I want to attempt today, to place the song back within the flow of the album, because it's doing far more than simply celebrating sex. But before we fully dive into its themes, it's worth stepping back to look at the song's fascinating origin story. The track, of course, features the iconic guitar playing of Nile Rogers, who we know was one of Daft Punk's most important musical influences growing up. But what you might not know is that the admiration actually went both ways. Rogers had been a fan of Daft Punk since first hearing Dafunk, even attending a release party for Homework all the way back in 1997. By the time the three finally came together to collaborate, Rogers had recently been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer and told it was terminal. He would eventually beat the cancer, but at the time he was simply trying to make as much music as possible while he still could. Get Lucky became one of the first songs he worked on after receiving the diagnosis. The sessions took place at Electric Lady Studio in New York, one of the most iconic recording spaces in music history. Built by Jimi Hendrix in 1970, the studio was used to record legendary albums ranging from Stevie Wonder's talking book to AC DC's Back in Black. Fittingly, it was also the very studio Rogers Band Chic recorded their first single in the 1970s, a full circle detail Niles himself reflected on in his Memory tapes interview with Random Access Memories they
- [08:13]
Nile Rodgers
said something to me that blew me away. They said that they wanted to do an album as if the Internet never existed. I get to the studio and there was nobody there except for Thomas and Guiman. I said to Thomas, man, you're standing exactly where Bernard Edwards was when we recorded our first hit. They were so surprised to find that we cut our first record, Electric Lady.
- [08:46]
Cole Kushner
In another interview with HuffPost, Niles explained how he helped Get Lucky evolve from its original form. During this session, they specifically asked me,
- [08:54]
Nile Rodgers
how did you make chic records? I says, well, it's funny that you say that, because we're actually recording in this, in the studio on H Street, that we recorded the very first Chic hit single, which was Dance, Dance, Dance, Yowza, Yowza. And I said, well, here's how we do it. So I took the song apart and basically rewrote it, and then everybody else then played to what I did.
- [09:18]
Cole Kushner
In a rare peek behind the curtain, Dafunk actually shared the footage of Niles laying down all three of his guitar parts in the historic Electric lady studio. When the track eventually made its way to Pharrell Williams, it had already undergone the Nile Rogers transformation. And the way Pharrell tells it, the connection felt almost divine, because at that exact moment in his life, he had been searching for precisely that sound. Here's Pharrell himself telling the story of recording the song with Daft Punk in a Paris studio.
- [10:08]
Pharrell Williams
Finally, I ended up in Paris. They were like, well, what have you been working on? And I played them some of the stuff that I had been working on. And I was like, yeah, I'm kind of like in this Niles Rogers place right now. And they looked at each other and I was like, what? You guys don't like that? And they were like, okay, so this is what we want you to write to. So they play it. Niles Rogers is actually playing the track.
- [10:52]
Cole Kushner
Forel begins the verse, like the legend of the Phoenix, all ends with beginnings. What keeps the planet spinning? The Force from the beginning. Immediately, the song frames itself around cycles of death and rebirth.
- [11:04]
Narrator/Analyst
As we noted earlier, the phoenix is
- [11:06]
Cole Kushner
the mythical bird that must burn away before it can rise again. Thus, it's become a classic symbol of transformation and renewal. And within the context of Random Access Memories and its celebration of artistic innovation, this line acknowledges the reality that old forms must eventually fade so new ones can emerge in their place. But we should also remember that one of the album's central tenets is Daft Funk's treatment of music as a metaphor for life, or perhaps even as life itself. And these opening lyrics capture that broader idea as well. The Force from the Beginning suggests that creativity, reinvention and forward progress are fundamental to human existence itself. New generations inherit the discoveries, traditions, and ideas of those who came before them, building upon that foundation before eventually passing it forward again. That's the rhythm of human life, one continuous human story, endlessly evolving through time. And as Get Lucky continues into its prechorus, Forell emphasizes the importance of preserving this that Humanity's long story of creativity, emotion, connection and self expression isn't something we should just casually abandon in pursuit of optimization or technological advance. For all Sings We've come too far to give up who we are. Understanding random access, memories, broader celebration of humanity in a world increasingly moving toward technology, it's difficult to hear this as anything other than a call to preserve the essential parts of ourselves. We've come too far, evolved too much, inherited too much from the generations before us to lose sight of the very qualities that made us human in the first place.
- [12:56]
Narrator/Analyst
Farrell then follows with the line, so
- [12:57]
Cole Kushner
let's raise the bar and our cups to the stars. The phrasing here is incredibly clever.
- [13:03]
Narrator/Analyst
On one level, raise the bar is
- [13:04]
Cole Kushner
another call toward progress and innovation, a push to continue moving humanity forward into new frontiers, with the stars symbolizing the
- [13:12]
Narrator/Analyst
limitless heights we can still reach together.
- [13:15]
Cole Kushner
But bar also evokes the nightclub setting of the song itself, while our Cups to the Stars conjures the image of a communal toast, a celebration of humanity. And on an album that equates music with life itself, the nightclub becomes an incredibly important symbol, a uniquely human space where people gather to dance, connect, lose themselves, and momentarily dissolve the boundaries between one another. And it's precisely this feeling of collective transcendence that launches the song into its euphoric chorus.
- [13:45]
Pharrell Williams
She's up all night to the sun I'm up all night to get some she's up all night for good fun I'm up all night to get lucky we're up all night to the sun we're up all night to get some we're up all night for good fun we're up all night to get lucky
- [14:02]
Cole Kushner
Pharrell sings She's up all night to the sun I'm up all night to get some she's up all night for good fun I'm up all night to get lucky. Of course, a basic reading of these lyrics points to sex, with both getting some and getting lucky being euphemisms for hooking up. However, in interviews, Pharrell was pretty adamant about these lyrics being a little deeper than people were giving them credit for, especially given the themes of the verse and prechorus being in that world.
- [14:27]
Pharrell Williams
It's like the only thing that really matters is that you've met this girl at this party. Getting lucky is not just sleeping with her, but meeting someone for the first time and it just clicking. There's no better fortune in this existence.
- [14:42]
Cole Kushner
To me, the essence of what Pharrell is talking about here is human connection. The magic magnetic spark between two people felt through physical presence heightened by the energy of music and life surrounding them. And as much as we've tried and will continue to try, it's an experience that can never be fully replicated digitally, no matter how advanced technology becomes. The same is true of Sex itself, a fundamentally human experience rooted in the physical body and physical sensation, and being intimately present with another human being in real time. These deeper layers to the song are a little hard to feel when Get Lucky is extracted from the context of the album, but when placed properly within the themes of random access memories, the song is clearly more meaningful than a simple celebration of partying or sex. After spending the first half of the album following Robot's yearning for emotion and connection, Get Lucky is a literal toast to those very things. It is a party for humanity. The nightclub setting, the dancing, the flirtation, the physical intimacy, all of it represents forms of human connection that can only truly exist through embodied experience, exemplifying the album's central thesis that amidst all of our technological advancement, all of our optimization and acceleration, the things that make life truly meaningful remain stubbornly, beautifully human.
- [16:01]
Pharrell Williams
She's up all night to the sun I'm up all night to get some she's up all night for good fun I'm up all night to get lucky
- [16:11]
Cole Kushner
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- [16:41]
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- [17:41]
Cole Kushner
Welcome back to Dissect. Before the break, we examine Get Lucky, the first Track on side 2 of Random Access Memories, where Daft Punk framed human connection, dance and physical intimacy as antidotes to isolation and emotional detachment. And as the album continues, the robots once again take the lead vocal. But now, after the revelations of touch and the rebirth imagery of Get Lucky, they are no longer trapped in mournful longing over what they lack. Now they are preparing for transcendence.
- [18:19]
Commander Eugene Cernan
Beyond life, you will find your song before it sounds to be found. Close your eyes
- [18:45]
Astronaut/Space Mission Voice
and
- [18:48]
Commander Eugene Cernan
close.
- [18:50]
Cole Kushner
A robot begins singing Dream beyond dreams, beyond life you will find your song. The theme of transcendence is established from the very start as to dream beyond dreams is to move beyond imagination, past the limits of the conscious mind. Beyond life then pushes the idea further into the spiritual or metaphysical, to some place or state outside the boundaries of ordinary human perception. And what exactly do we find there? Your song. In the thematic language of Random Access memories, it's an incredibly significant revelation, as music here is formally positioned as the catalyst for transcendence itself, something capable of carrying us beyond the self and into a higher state of consciousness. This is further supported by the next phrase, before sound to be found. This suggests that music exists on some deeper plane before it even manifests physically as sound, almost like an eternal truth or spirit waiting to be accessed beneath reality itself. In its purest form, music is a conduit into something formless and eternal, a divine current flowing beneath ordinary reality.
- [19:55]
Narrator/Analyst
The following line close your eyes and
- [19:57]
Cole Kushner
rise, only reinforces the meditative quality of the passage. It sounds less like a traditional lyric and more like instructions, guidance into an altered state of awareness. It evokes ancient ideas found in Zen Buddhism and other meditative traditions, where enlightenment is often associated with transcending the ego and dissolving the boundaries between self and the universe. And in the world of random access memories, music is offered as the vehicle that makes this transcendence possible.
- [20:38]
Commander Eugene Cernan
To the land of love beyond love come alive, angel I forever watching you were tied.
- [21:04]
Narrator/Analyst
After rising beyond dreams, life and song,
- [21:07]
Cole Kushner
our narrator pushes even further, singing higher still, endless thrill to the land of love. This is, of course, a direct callback to touch and its revelatory refrain, if love is the answer, your home. Much like music, love here is framed as a conduit toward transcendence, a force capable of carrying us beyond the limits of the self. But even that isn't the final destination. As the verse continues climbing with the final lines, the beyond love come alive, angel eye forever Watching you and I at the highest point. Yet beyond dreams, life, song, silence and love, we unite with some kind of divine presence, some omniscient spirit observing everything from above. Interestingly, it's here that the narrator says that we come alive. It seems to suggest that our earthly experience, the physical world, the ego, the self, is only a limited state of consciousness, and that true aliveness, true awakening, comes through this transcendence by dissolving the boundaries, separating ourselves from the universe and uniting with the divine. Now, whatever exactly this transcendent realm or divine presence might be, beyond seems less interested in offering concrete answers than in restoring a sense of perspective, a reminder that we are small and that our individual lives are only one part of a much larger, more mysterious existence extending far beyond our ordinary perception of reality.
- [22:35]
Commander Eugene Cernan
You are the light behind the cloud. You are the end in the beginning, a world where time is not allowed.
- [22:49]
Cole Kushner
The lofty themes of beyond continue in its second verse, with our robot narrator singing directly to us. You are the night, you are the ocean. You are the light behind a cloud. The imagery here positions humanity alongside some of the most vast, mysterious and awe inspiring forces in nature. The idea is rendered even more powerful by the first person address, as the narrator speaks directly to us, to you, with an affection usually reserved for a lover because it sees you as an expression of the universe, a being as deep and unknowable as the ocean, as expansive as the night sky, carrying within you the same wondrous beauty and spiritual depth found throughout the natural world. The robot then continues its endearing rhetoric. You are the end and the beginning. A world where time is not allowed. Much like Forel's opening lines on Get Lucky, Life and Death, endings and beginnings are presented not as opposites, but interconnected parts of a larger infinite cycle we all belong to. The song imagines a dimension beyond ordinary human perception, where the boundaries separating past, present and future dissolve completely. And interestingly, this idea isn't purely spiritual or philosophical. Even modern physics challenges our intuitive understanding of time as something linear and absolute. Einstein's theory of relativity demonstrated that time is deeply tied to perception and motion, while some interpretations of physics suggest that past, present and future may all coexist simultaneously within the fabric of spacetime itself. In other words, the way humans ordinarily experience time as a straight line constantly moving forward is likely more psychological than fundamental to reality itself. And that's precisely what beyond is set on reminding us of. The song is guiding us out of the hypnotic cycle of daily life. It's zooming out, forcing us to Remember that beneath all the noise and distractions of modern life is something much larger and more magically mysterious than the narrow reality we typically confine ourselves to.
- [24:48]
Commander Eugene Cernan
There's no such thing as competition. To find our way, we lose control. Remember love's own only nation. This is the journey of the soul. The perfect song is framed with silence. It speaks of places never seen. You hold a is long forgotten. It is the birthplace of your dreams.
- [25:25]
Cole Kushner
Beyond continues with the line, there's no such thing as competition within the spiritual framework of the song. So far, this feels like a direct rejection of the ego driven systems humans create to separate and rank ourselves against one another. Competition, status, tribalism, nationalism, greed. These are all instincts rooted in identifying too strongly with the individual self, with the ego. But from the elevated perspective of beyond, those divisions dissolve completely. If humanity is ultimately one interconnected whole, then competition itself becomes something of an illusion as we fail to recognize ourselves and one another and succumb to our ego's most primitive instincts to fixate entirely on individual survival within this temporary physical world. The robot then continues to find our way. We lose control. This is an incredibly consistent idea presented throughout Random Access Memories, but it's never articulated as explicitly as it is here, be it through losing yourself to dance or dissolving into the collective harmony of a choir. Daft Punk have repeatedly presented transcendence through surrender, with music acting as a conduit that can reconnect us to our shared humanity. To find our way, we lose control states plainly this underlying concept, evoking long standing ideas found in many Eastern philosophies, where enlightenment is realized through letting go of the ego entirely. This critical line is followed by another just as critical. Remember, love's our only mission. This is a journey of the soul. The callback to touch here is pretty explicit. Once again, love is framed as the ultimate destination, the guiding force beneath the entire journey. Interestingly, it is not a journey of life, but rather a journey of the soul. The warning here is deliberate. It's not your soul or my soul, it's the soul. That distinction is consistent with the song's emphasis on the universal, the shared humanity, or in this case, the shared human soul. We are all but expressions of beyond. Then arrives at its penultimate couplet. The perfect song is framed with silence. It speaks of places never seen. This feels like a deliberate callback to the second couplet of the first verse. You will find your song before sound to be found. Close your eyes and rise. In both passages, songs are juxtaposed with silence, while discovery is framed through paradox, a song existing before sound, places never seen, and the instructions to close your eyes in order to truly find something. These repeated motifs emphasize accessing a formless essence beyond ordinary sensory perception before it fully manifests into physical form or conscious understanding, before sound, before language, before image. And so, rather than representing absence, silence is presented as a state of infinite potential, the space from which everything else emerges. We then reach beyond's final your home's a promise long forgotten. It is the birthplace of your dreams. This completes the callback to the song's opening verse as the final word, dreams, directly points back to the opening line, dream beyond dreams, enclosing the track in a lyrical circle. Importantly, home has already been defined on Touch, we know that home is love. Here, that same home is described as the birthplace of your dreams, suggesting that love, connection, wonder, imagination, they all emerge from the same deeper spiritual source. But it's a source that humanity has gradually lost touch with over time. Not because it disappeared, but because adulthood, modern life, ego, competition, and endless technological distraction pull us away from it. We are constantly consumed by optimization, productivity, status, survival, the very restless, exhausting lifestyle Daft Punk described back on Lose yourself to Dance. And in the process, we forget how to dream, we forget how to experience wonder. We forget how magical and mysterious and miraculous what we are and what we're a part of truly is. And beyond functions as an explicit reminder that the magic never actually vanished. The universe is still infinite, life is still beautiful, love is still the answer, but humanity has just become too distracted to see it. And so the song ultimately is a call to return, to reconnect with the deeper essence it's been describing, that higher plane of consciousness beyond ego, beyond competition, beyond the noise and acceleration of modern life. This is what makes the song's circular structure so meaningful. Beyond begins and ends with dreams, the primitive seed of human imagination, wonder, creativity and potential. By ultimately returning to its point of origin, the song embodies its own central message, a return to something fundamental and eternal, a deeper essence humanity has gradually lost touch with. In this way, beyond is Daft Punk's most explicit spiritual statement in their career. The song suggests that the most essential part of being human is our capacity to connect with realities beyond the material world, to become one with the divine. This is a uniquely human quality, something technology will never truly experience or replicate. And of course, the irony of the song, and really Daft Punk's entire career, is that the very things that distinguish us from machines are communicated to us here via robots, as if some future, more technologically advanced version of ourselves are reaching backward through time, reminding us to value our humanity before we lose touch with it Completely. Narratively, beyond plays a critical role in setting up Random Access Memories third act. The song's final lines, emphasizing a mission and journey beyond this plane of existence, reframes the remainder of the album as a kind of spiritual voyage, one that will ultimately culminate in the cosmic ascent depicted on the album's final track, Contact. But first, the robots have to say goodbye.
- [31:29]
Todd Edwards
Driving this road down to paradise Letting the sunlight into my eyes Our only plan is to improvise and it's crystal clear that I don't ever want it to end if I had my way I would never leave Keep building these random memories Turning our days into melodies
- [31:54]
Narrator/Analyst
but since I can't stay random access
- [31:58]
Cole Kushner
memories 11th track fragments of Time reunites Daft Punk with garage house producer Todd Edwards, whom they collaborated with on Discoveries Face to Face. Edwards traveled from his home in New Jersey and stayed in Los Angeles for three weeks to work on the song, and according to Edwards, Thomas and Gimon wanted the song to be about his experience in la. Working on the song itself, we would
- [32:19]
Todd Edwards
drive down from Thomas house off of Mulholland Dr. With the top down. The weather was gorgeous, and this is like a dream, you know, like, it's like. It sounds like something in a movie. I was just like, this is amazing. I'm here for three weeks, it's like, I don't want to go home. Like, you know, you're already thinking, like, this is so amazing. Like, you know you want it to last. So that was like kind of the beginning premise of the song.
- [32:49]
Cole Kushner
Edwards experience in Los Angeles comes through pretty clearly in the opening lines. Driving this road down to paradise Letting the sunlight into my eyes Our only plan is to improvise. On one level, he's describing the literal drives from Tomas House to the studio, cruising through LA with a top down before entering the studio with no rigid blueprint or plan. The creative process itself was an act of surrender, trusting the spontaneity and the chemistry of human collaboration to guide the music wherever it wanted to go. In this sense, the song puts into practice the same philosophy we just heard on To Find Our Way. We lose control, Edwardson sings, and it's crystal clear that I don't ever want it to end. Which of course reflects the joy of making music with Daft Punk. But this is also where the song begins to open up into something larger, because it gradually becomes clear he's not just singing about the recording sessions, he's singing about life itself. That dual meaning becomes pretty clear in the following if I had my way, I would never leave. Keep building these random memories, turning our days into melodies. Once again, Random Access Memories explicitly dissolves the boundary between music and life, treating lived experience itself as composition, where memories become melodies and days become songs. Even the phrase random memories directly evokes the album's title, reinforcing the idea that life itself is an accumulation of fleeting emotional fragments that become preserved in sound. In this way, music becomes a kind of amber, preserving tiny pieces of human experience across time, allowing emotions, memories and moments of life to remain suspended long after the moment itself has passed. I'll just keep during the chorus, we hear Todd Edwards signature contribution to the production, as his trademark micro sampling technique transforms tiny fragments of audio into dense, shimmering sonic collages. And beyond simply sounding incredible, the technique adds an entire additional layer of meaning to the lyrics, effectively turning the chorus into a kind of triple entendre. Edwards sings, I'll just keep playing back these fragments of time Everywhere I go these moments will shine first the phrase acts as a clever wink to the production itself, as the song formally embodies its own title. On another level, the fragments of time are memories themselves, the accumulated moments that make up a human life. But within the context of random Access memories, the phrase takes on yet another meaning. Remember A few episodes back, we discussed Thomas description of the songs on the albums as vials filled with life, music itself as a container for memory and emotion, preserving fleeting moments across time. A song can instantly transport us back into another era of our lives, reopening emotional pathways into the mind connected to specific people, places and experiences. In this sense, songs themselves become fragments of time, and this is what makes the song's meta quality so powerful. Because Fragments of Time is about the creation of fragments in time, in real time, the song demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between life and music, how music soundtracks are experiences while those experiences in turn become embedded back into the music. Or to say it another way, in the language of the album, the music of your life gives life back to music.
- [36:18]
Todd Edwards
Familiar faces I've never seen Living the gold in the silver dream Making me feel like I'm 17 and it's crystal clear that I don't ever want it to end if I had my way
- [36:34]
Cole Kushner
I would Never Leave verse 2 continues the song's overarching meta concept as Edward sings familiar faces I've never seen. This paradox evokes the kind of murkiness of memory, but it also slyly nods to the anonymity of Tomas and Gimon. This is all but confirmed in the next line, Living the Gold and the Silver Dream. On its surface, it describes the vivid color of dreams and the dream of making music with Daft Punk in Los Angeles. But coming off the Face's never seen line, it also clearly points to Daft Punk's iconic helmets, with Thomas being silver and Gimon's gold. The following line, making me Feel Like I'm 17, also operates on multiple levels within the context of the song. It speaks to the rejuvenating feeling of creating music with Daft Punk, the sense of freedom, excitement, spontaneity, and possibility that can make adulthood briefly fall away and return us to a more youthful state of wonderful. It's a feeling many people associate with their happiest moments, experiences so alive and emotionally present that they momentarily reconnect us with the openness and optimism of youth. But following the clear nod to Thomat and Gimon themselves, the line also resonates more broadly with Daft Punk's artistic philosophy, particularly the ideas they explored back on Discovery, an album Todd Edwards himself contributed to. That record was fundamentally about reconnecting with Childlike Wonderful and rediscovering the emotional purity music gave us when we were young. And knowing now that Random Access Memories would become Daft Punk's final album, the line takes on an even deeper resonance. Because as we approach the end of both the album and ultimately Daft Punk's career itself, this entire second verse, and really this entire song, begins to feel like the duo looking back on their own lives and creative journey together, their own fragments of time, memories of making music with each other with collaborators like Todd Edwards, and the bittersweet realization that even these beautiful moments eventually come to an end. But there's also something kind of comforting embedded in the song's philosophy, because as Random Access Memories has consistently proposed from its very first track, music has the power to preserve life itself. And every time we press play, the emotions, memories and experiences attached to these songs come alive again, not only for Daft Punk, but for us listeners as well. The music becomes a shared archive of human experience, allowing both artists and audience to continually revisit the fragments of life embedded within it. Now, of course, we don't know whether Thoma and Gimon knew Random Access Memories would be their final project while writing it, but listening now today, Fragments of Time, with its emphasis on mortality and reflection, certainly feels like a goodbye.
- [39:13]
Todd Edwards
I'll just keep dragging back. Moments will shine.
- [39:24]
Cole Kushner
Fragments of Time is followed by Random Access Memories penultimate song. Doing it right, featuring Panda Bear, the founding member of the experimental pop group Animal Collective. Now we're not going to spend too much time on the song, mostly because its core theme is one we've already spent considerable time dissecting.
- [39:40]
Narrator/Analyst
The track reinforces dance and music as
- [39:42]
Cole Kushner
vehicles for transcendence and communal connection. If humanity is doing it right, we're dancing together, celebrating each other, losing ourselves in collective experience. The song also embodies a balanced harmony
- [39:55]
Narrator/Analyst
between technology and humanity in its equal
- [39:57]
Cole Kushner
blend of robot and human voices, Dafunk and Panda Bear engage in a beautiful
- [40:02]
Narrator/Analyst
musical dialogue, the vocoder often functioning as
- [40:04]
Cole Kushner
supporting harmony to Panda Bear's natural voice. Rather than competing with one another, the human and machine interact seamlessly, each enhancing the other's strengths.
- [40:14]
Narrator/Analyst
It's another sonic realization of one Random
- [40:17]
Cole Kushner
Access Memory's central ideas that technology at
- [40:20]
Narrator/Analyst
its best does not replace humanity, but complements it.
- [40:45]
Cole Kushner
Here, Panda Bear reinforces one of the album's most consistent philosophical ideas that meaning is often found not through greater control, but through surrender, he sings. If you lose your way tonight that's how we know the magic's right again.
- [40:59]
Narrator/Analyst
Daft Punk put forth this idea that
- [41:01]
Cole Kushner
transcendence comes from letting go, losing yourself to dance, dissolving into collective harmony, moving beyond the ego and into connection with something larger than yourself. And after the spiritual revelations of the songs, Touch and Beyond, the Line now feels less like simple dance floor advice and more like a final affirmation of the album's worldview before its closing ascent.
- [41:31]
Astronaut/Space Mission Voice
Hey Bob, I'm looking at what Jack was talking about, and it's definitely not a particle that's nearby. It is a bright object and it's obviously rotating.
- [41:44]
Cole Kushner
Random Access Memory's final song, Contact, begins with the album's only two samples. The music comes from a 1981 song called We Ride Tonight by Australian rock band the Sherbs, and it seems Daft Punk chose the sample not only for its sound but also for its theme. As the title suggests, We Ride Tonight is about a literal journey into the night, and fittingly, the album the song appears on is titled Defying Gravity.
- [42:09]
Narrator/Analyst
This makes it the perfect thematic pairing
- [42:11]
Cole Kushner
for the track's other sample, the voice of Commander Eugene cernan from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, the last time human beings set foot on the moon. Together, the two samples establish contact around ideas of exploration, transcendence, innovation, and humanity pushing beyond earthly boundaries into the unknown.
- [42:29]
Narrator/Analyst
Indeed, the Apollo space missions themselves represent
- [42:32]
Cole Kushner
the ideal relationship between humans and technology portrayed throughout Random Access memories, machines not replacing humanity but Extending its reach. Tools that allow human curiosity and imagination to venture further than we ever could on our own.
- [42:48]
Astronaut/Space Mission Voice
It is a bright object and it's obviously rotating because it's flashing. It's way out in the distance, apparently rotating in a very rhythmic fashion because the flashes come around almost on time. As we look back at the Earth, it's up at about 11 o', clock, about maybe 10 or 12 earth diameters. I don't know whether that does you any good, but there's something out there.
- [43:23]
Cole Kushner
Now, what we hear Commander Cernan described is a mysterious flashing object he sees outside the window of his spaceship's cabin. In reality, it turns out this was
- [43:32]
Narrator/Analyst
a discarded rocket stage from earlier in
- [43:34]
Cole Kushner
the mission, with the flashes caused by it rotating and reflecting sunlight, but placed
- [43:39]
Narrator/Analyst
within Random Access memories.
- [43:40]
Cole Kushner
With its emphasis on dance music, human innovation and transcendence, the description becomes completely recontextualized. Cernan says it is a bright object and is obviously rotating because it's flashing. It's way out in the distance. Currently rotating in a very rhythmic fashion because the flashes come around almost on time. Now let's stop and think about this image within the symbolic language of the album. A flashing, rotating object spinning rhythmically in time.
- [44:08]
Narrator/Analyst
What does that resemble?
- [44:10]
Cole Kushner
Well, I know what it makes me think of. A disco ball. And for me, the brilliance of this detail is almost beyond comprehension. Because by this point in the album, the dance floor has become one of Random Access, Memory's central symbols. A space of transcendence, human connection, collective surrender, and spiritual elevation through rhythm and music. For Daft Punk, the dance floor is a microcosm of humanity at its best. It's humanity doing it right. And now, here in Contact, at the edge of the Earth itself, Daft Punk transformed the disco ball into something cosmic.
- [44:43]
Narrator/Analyst
An object floating in space, pulsing rhythmically
- [44:46]
Cole Kushner
like a beacon, almost like a portal into another dimension and hanging there above the planet itself. It's as if Earth has become one giant dance floor, a vision of humanity united by music. Musically, Contact features an arpeggiated synth sequence that repeats for the majority of the song. Importantly, the arpeggios are all ascending. The notes get higher and higher, giving
- [45:32]
Narrator/Analyst
the song that lifting, rising quality befitting
- [45:35]
Cole Kushner
its depiction of an interdimensional journey.
- [45:37]
Narrator/Analyst
But as great as this synth part is, the real Star of Contact enters
- [45:41]
Cole Kushner
the song a little over halfway through the track.
- [45:43]
Narrator/Analyst
Let's take a listen, then we'll talk about what we're hearing. Contact explodes into a face melting groove centered around a piercing, sustained synth tone that cuts through the mix like a rocket engine igniting.
- [46:21]
Cole Kushner
Now, Daft Punk most likely created this
- [46:23]
Narrator/Analyst
effect by slowly opening the cutoff frequency
- [46:25]
Cole Kushner
of an extremely resonant low pass filter applied to a heavily distorted synth patch, sustaining a single note, allowing more and more high frequency information to emerge over time.
- [46:36]
Narrator/Analyst
The result is a powerful illusion of
- [46:38]
Cole Kushner
ascent, as though the sound itself is continually breaking through new layers of reality as it climbs higher and higher.
- [46:45]
Narrator/Analyst
Remarkably, this ascent continues for nearly the
- [46:48]
Cole Kushner
entire remaining three minutes of the track. At a certain point, the music stops feeling like a song, and instead becomes a piece of sonic cinema, a depiction of transcendence itself. We seem to be hurtling through space at impossible speed, accelerating ever further beyond Earth towards some higher plane of existence. It's an incredible and intensely visceral listening experience. Every time the music seems like it can't possibly rise any higher, it somehow continues climbing. Then at the 4 minute and 48 second mark, the drums, bass and arpeggiated synth suddenly stopping and that rising sound snaps back into a lower register.
- [47:54]
Narrator/Analyst
For a brief moment, it feels as
- [47:56]
Cole Kushner
though the journey has ended, but almost immediately, the distorted tone starts rising again and we begin hearing these kind of abstract, amorphous blobs of sound. In my reading of this moment, the ascent has now crossed into a dimension beyond ordinary human perception, as if Daft Punk are sonically depicting a realm that exists beyond sound and form as we know them.
- [48:42]
Narrator/Analyst
The rising synth finally collapses, leaving behind
- [48:45]
Cole Kushner
only those warping, amorphous sounds drifting and gyrating like clouds of sonic stardust. But these eventually collapse too, as if they're being pulled into whatever portal or dimension the track has been ascending toward. Then the album ends. After such an intensely cinematic experience, we're left wondering, what exactly just happened? What was that intended to depict? Well, in my view, there's really only one way to read this, because this moment was pretty explicitly set up earlier on the track Beyond It Was There. Daft Punk repeatedly described music as a conduit toward transcendence, a force capable of carrying us beyond dreams, beyond sound, beyond self, beyond ordinary perception, beyond even the physical world itself it described, uniting with a divine realm of pure love. What the song Touch defined as home
- [49:57]
Narrator/Analyst
and in my view, Contact depicts the
- [49:59]
Cole Kushner
album's robot protagonist's spiritual ascent, transcending the material world and uniting with this higher, timeless plane beyond spent its entire runtime describing. The distorted synth rise becomes the sonic representation of that ascent, until finally all recognizable musical structure disintegrates, as though the robot has crossed over the limits of ordinary perception. And reunited with the divine formless essence the album has been pointing to throughout its second half. In other words, it arrives home not
- [50:28]
Narrator/Analyst
to a place, but a return to
- [50:30]
Cole Kushner
the source, the deeper eternal reality beneath the material world that beyond described as the birthplace of our dreams. It's the pure spiritual essence humanity has gradually lost touch with, and the missing piece the robot had been sensing but could not fully understand. And importantly, the robot does not achieve transcendence through greater technological advancement. It achieved it through the humanity it rediscovered. It achieved it through love, through music, through dance, through surrender, through all the deeply human capabilities machines may one day imitate, but never truly feel, embody or experience.
- [51:06]
Narrator/Analyst
And that's ultimately the story of Random
- [51:08]
Cole Kushner
Access Memories and its beautiful, powerful celebration of the human spirit. A robot moves toward humanity in a
- [51:14]
Narrator/Analyst
world moving toward technology, only to discover
- [51:17]
Cole Kushner
that the transcendence humanity seeks through machines was already within us from the very beginning.
- [51:23]
Narrator/Analyst
In this way, Random Access Memories doesn't merely conclude the story of the album, it closes the loop on the larger narrative Daft Punk had been building across their entire career. Homework began with two humans learning to master machines. Then Discovery explored the euphoric possibilities of humans and technology merging together, literally birthing the Daft Punk robots. Then human after all, confronted the dark
- [51:46]
Cole Kushner
side of this relationship, the emotional emptiness that occurs when the scale tips too far and technology overwhelms humanity. And now Random Access Memories return to humanity both in its themes and its human based creation delivers the message they had ultimately been working toward the entire time. At a moment in history when the relationship between humanity and technology will almost
- [52:07]
Narrator/Analyst
certainly define the 21st century.
- [52:09]
Cole Kushner
Daft punk never argued that we should reject technology altogether. They simply insisted that humanity must come first, that we cannot afford to lose ourselves along the way, that what makes us human, our capacity for love, imagination, intimacy, discovery and transcendence is not something to evolve beyond. It's something sacred we must preserve.
- [52:32]
Todd Edwards
And the Grammy goes to
- [52:37]
Trimfaya Advertisement Voice
randomaccessmemories-com Featured
- [52:42]
Cole Kushner
artists Julian Casaglandas, DJ Falcon, Todd Edwards, Chili Gonzalez, Giorgio Moroder, Panda Bear, Mal Rogers, Paul Williams and Pharrell Williams.
- [52:53]
Narrator/Analyst
Released on May 17, 2013, Random Access Memories would become the most successful and decorated album of Daft Punk's career. The record debuted at number one in more than 20 countries, sold millions of copies worldwide, and produced the decade defining hit Get Lucky. And at the 56th annual Grammy Awards, Daft Punk were the most awarded artists of the night, taking home five Grammys, including the highest honor in popular music album of the year. Dressed in their now iconic white suits and helmets. Thoma and Gimon took the stage alongside the eclectic cast of humans who helped bring random access memories to life, including Pharrell Williams, Nile Rogers, Todd Edwards and Georgio Moroder. But the person they chose to speak on their behalf was none other than Paul Williams, the star of Phantom of the paradise, the music centered film Thoma and Gimon bonded over when they first met in middle school. The film they later described as the foundation for their entire artistic identity.
- [53:51]
Paul Williams
You know, I just got a message from the robots and what they wanted me to say is that as elegant and as classy as the Grammy has ever been is the moment when we saw those wonderful marriages and the same love is as fantastic. And it was the height of the fairness and love and the power of love for all people at any time in any combination is what they wanted me to say.
- [54:20]
Narrator/Analyst
Williams here was speaking to an event held earlier in the evening when the Grammys conducted a mass wedding for same sex couples. Now it's hard to overstate the symbolism of this moment. Everything Daft Punk stood for artistically is represented on this stage, accepting music's most prestigious honor. They are surrounded by the very humans who inspired them as kids and who decades later helped them create the most celebrated album of their career. An album devoted to reaffirming humanity and the transformative power of music. And at the center of it all is Paul Williams, accepting the biggest award
- [54:53]
Cole Kushner
of their lives on their behalf.
- [54:55]
Narrator/Analyst
Few moments better capture how completely Thoma and Gimon's journey had come full circle. And through Paul Williams, Daft Punk used this moment to deliver a message of
- [55:04]
Cole Kushner
love to the world.
- [55:05]
Narrator/Analyst
Perhaps on the night it sounded like a passing cliche, but having followed Dave Punk's entire career this season, we can recognize just how sincere this message was. Because love was not only the conclusion of Random Access Memories, it was the central revelation at the heart of Daft Punk's entire body of work. Love was the answer to the robot's search, the source of its transcendence, the uniquely human emotion that finally brought it home.
- [55:36]
Commander Eugene Cernan
Hold on.
- [55:50]
Narrator/Analyst
At 2:22pm On February 22, 2021, DAFunk released a video titled Epilogue, a literary term referring to the final section of a story, one that reveals what happens after the main narrative has ended. The video repurposed the final scene of Electroma as a standalone 8 minute farewell. We see the two robot characters walking side by side in the desert. Thoma's character suddenly stops and after a silent but clearly understood goodbye, Toma has Gimon activate his self destruct mechanism. Thoma walks several paces in the opposite direction, then explodes into thousands of pieces. As smoke billows into the sky, the second half of Touch begins to play. The screen cuts to black, then two hands appear, one Thomas, one Gimon's, coming together to form a pyramid. Beneath them are the dates 1993 to 2021. The film then returns to the desert. A beautiful sunset stretches across across the horizon as Gimon's character walks steadily toward the fading light, becoming smaller and smaller against the endless expanse. In these final moments, Touch is stripped down to its essence, an acapella rendition of its refrain sung only by the human voices of children.
- [57:21]
Commander Eugene Cernan
Hold on.
- [57:23]
Narrator/Analyst
If love is the answer, your home, hold on. Epilogue was of course, Daft Punk's formal retirement announcement. And staying true to their mythological origin story, they released the video On February 22, 2021, at exactly 2:22pm A numerical callback to the moment they transformed into robots, an event said to have occurred on September 9, 1999, at exactly 9:09am where 9:09 nodded to the heartbeat of house music, the Roland TR909 drum machine. 2:22 perhaps nods to the duo themselves, two humans who spent 22 years as robots from 1999 to 2021. And looking back, Random Access Memories feels almost destined to have been Daft Punk's final album. Whether intentional or serendipitous, they somehow wrote the perfect ending for themselves. Their career had been one long ascent, always evolving, always reaching for something higher before disappearing beyond the horizon at the very peak of their powers, leaving behind about as perfect a musical legacy any artist could ever hope for. And having now reached the end of
- [58:37]
Cole Kushner
our analysis of that legacy, I want
- [58:39]
Narrator/Analyst
to conclude by returning to a quote I read to you earlier this season.
- [58:43]
Cole Kushner
It comes from the liner notes of
- [58:45]
Narrator/Analyst
Daft Punk's homework, attributed to the legendary
- [58:47]
Cole Kushner
Beach Boys songwriter Brian Wilson.
- [58:49]
Narrator/Analyst
It reads, quote, I wanted to write joyful music that made other people feel good, music that helps and heals, because I believe that music is God's voice. This simple but profound quote attached to their debut album reads like a mission statement set forth from Day one. In it, we can already sense the almost spiritual devotion young Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Almcristo had for music and for musical innovators like Brian Wilson, who kept music alive by pushing it
- [59:19]
Cole Kushner
into new emotional and creative territory.
- [59:22]
Narrator/Analyst
And as we now reflect holistically on Daft Punk's career, we can see just how faithfully they lived up to this mission. Their belief in Music as a transformative force remained evident at every step of the way. They treated music with profound reverence, understanding that their ability to speak in God's voice was something to be served, not exploited. In their entire 28 years making music together, Daft Punk never repeated themselves. They never chased trends, never gave into formulas that guaranteed success. And one often overlooked fact is that they remained self funded, independent artists throughout their entire career, always prioritizing artistic freedom over commercial certainty. And whether they were transforming house music on homework, turning electronic music into cinematic nostalgia on discovery, reinventing live performance on Alive 2007, or using random access memories to remind us of the value of our humanity, Daft Punk's underlying creative philosophy remained remarkably consistent. An unrelenting desire to push music forward while preserving the sense of childlike wonder
- [60:27]
Cole Kushner
that made them fall in love with
- [60:28]
Narrator/Analyst
music in the first place. By doing so, Thoma and Gimon succeeded in their mission of creating art that helps and heals. They filled hundreds of vials with vibrant life, timeless music that captures the unexplainable
- [60:41]
Cole Kushner
beauty of the human experience.
- [60:43]
Narrator/Analyst
And so, although the robots have left us, they've left behind the greatest of artifacts. A musical legacy designed to remind humanity who we are, what we are, and the magical, mysterious thing we're all a part of.
- [61:01]
Commander Eugene Cernan
Sam.