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In 1995, Daft Punk was the most exciting new act in electronic music. This single, Dafunk exploded across the underground house and techno scene and within a few months nearly every major label came calling eager to sign the next big thing. But Thomas and Gimon were barely in their twenties, Defunk was just their second single and they were still relatively new to making electronic music. They didn't see themselves as stars, they saw themselves as students. So instead of signing the first deal offered, they disappeared into their makeshift bedroom studio, putting themselves through a self guided education, studying the sounds of their musical heroes and reshaping those influences into something new. Their graduation came in the form of a debut album, a 16 track project that fully lived up to the hype. A project that formally advanced Daft Punk from students to masters. 1997's homework from the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Cole Kushna, this is Dissect and today our season long exploration of Daft Punk continues with a deep dive into their debut album Homework.
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Released in January 1997, Homework captures daft Punk in the act of learning out loud. As we covered last episode, Thoma and Gimon had only been introduced to electronic music a few years earlier, prompting them to abandon their high school rock band ambitions and immerse themselves in the underground house and techno scenes spreading from America across Europe. Homework plays like a tour through the genres the two were absorbing in real time. The album's third track, Revolution 909, draws directly from Chicago house. Meanwhile, a song like Rollin and Scratchin shares qualities of Detroit and UK techno. At the time of Homework's release, Thoma explained the album's educational approach to Pop magazine, saying, we see it as a training for our upcoming albums. We would as well have been able to call it lesson or learning. Nowhere is Homework's educational framework more explicit than the song Teachers. Where Daft Punk literally name check 43 of the artists they were studying, Teachers effectively turns the album's liner notes into a song, a rare moment in which a project openly names its influences from within the work itself. As such, we're going to use the song as our roadmap through Homework, not only to trace the artists and scenes that influence Daft Punk's early sound, but also to do our own homework on the history and defining features of electronic dance music, one of the most important musical revolutions of the past 50 years. More than any other genre, Daft Punk's Homework is indebted to house music, a genre that emerged from the collapse of disco in the late 70s and early 80s. Today, disco is often remembered as a broad pop culture phenomenon, but its origins are rooted in black, Latino and queer communities where marginalized DJs and dancers created safe spaces during a time in which same sex dancing was either illegal or banned by club owners. At these underground parties, DJs kept the dance floor moving with upbeat soul, funk and Latin American music. And soon a new sound began to emerge around a few distinct musical features, and chief among them was this. Pioneered by Philadelphia drummer Earl Young, this is what became known as Four on the Floor, a relentless kick drum thumping away on all four quarter notes of a measure. Earl Young described this as his twist on a popular Motown rhythm known as the Heartbeat, which plays the snare drum on every quarter note. This relentless snare creates a piercing, driving energy that underscored a number of Motown hits, including the Four Tops, Reach out and the Supremes Stop in the Name of Love.
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Now if you feel that you can't go on because all of your hope is gone and your last.
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The heartbeat rhythm gets its name from the way the snare mimics the steady, repetitive pulse of an actual heartbeat. Earl Young took that concept and shifted it to the kick drum, a deeper, more danceable sound than the piercing snare. This simple change ranks among the most important developments in modern music, laying the foundation not only for disco, but nearly every dance music genre that followed thereafter. Early on anchored this continuous kick drum with a snare on the second and fourth beats of a measure, a pattern known as the backbeat, which is itself one of the most important rhythmic developments to emerge from early R and B and rock and roll. Taken together, this combination became what we now call the disco beat. And it contains within it the DNA of black American music. The steady pulse of Motown soul, the backbeat of R B and rock and roll, and the physical emphasis of funk all fused into a single dance floor driven groove. Now, variations of the disco beat primarily came from the hi hat, which could modify the groove depending on the needs of a song. You can play steady 8th notes like this or add some energy with a faster 16th note pattern. One of the more iconic hi hat variations was opening the hi hats on the offbeats, the space in between the kick and snare hits creating heavy syncopation. Let's now hear some of these disco beats in action. Here's Eric Young's band the tramps and their 1971 cover of Zing the Strings of My Heart, the first song Young used the disco beat on. He actually plays the Motown heartbeat rhythm in the chorus, which we'll hear first, then switches to the disco beat for the bridge.
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Sing with the strings of my heart
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Listen to me now.
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Lord have mercy.
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This lush string LED bridge is a snapshot of the disco sound that would crystallize throughout the 1970s. Here's another tramp song, Disco Inferno, from 1976, when the disco sound had fully come into its own again. Listen for drummer Eric Young playing that driving four on the floor disco beat. Throughout the mid to late 70s, disco spread into the mainstream, where it ultimately drew backlash from culturally conservative audiences hostile to its ties with queer life and black culture. At the same time, the disco sound became diluted by a flood of cheap imitations attempting to exploit its commercial success. This led to the Disco Sucks movement, where the once thriving genre fell out of fashion, at least in the mainstream. And so in the early 80s, Disco retreated back to the underground, where its essence would be reworked into something new. In a small, primarily gay, black and Latino Chicago club called the Warehouse resident DJ Frankie Knuckles began reimagining disco records beyond their original forms. Rather than treating records as fixed songs, Knuckles extended and blended them into long, uninterrupted mixes designed to keep the dance floor moving continuously. This approach quickly spread through Chicago's black DJ community. And as DJs pushed records further and further, the spaces between the songs, the moment where one track bled into the next, began to matter as much as the songs themselves. And to gain more control over those moments, DJs started adding reel to reel tape machines alongside their turntables, allowing them to loop and blend the sections that worked best on the dance floor. Remixing disco in real time and before long, one specific addition to the DJ setup would prove itself to be nothing short of revolutionary. This is the sound of the Roland TR909, an electronic drum machine released in the early 80s along with its predecessor, the TR808. The 909 was deemed a commercial failure, leaving them to circulate through secondhand stores where DJs could pick them up for cheap. Using the 808 or 909 stock drum sounds, producers could program their own four on the floor beats, effectively transforming the disco beat from this. To something like this. Programming electronic drums behind disco loops not only gave DJs more control over their mixes, it set the stage for an entirely new genre of music to emerge. This is DJ Jesse Saunders 1984 track on and on, widely considered the first ever house song to be pressed to vinyl. Saunders was from Chicago's south side and was heavily influenced by Frankie knuckles approach to DJing, blending and remixing disco records with original electronic instruments. Saunders on and on was the first to present this kind of remixing as its own standalone art form. The track centers around a loop pulled from a song called Space Invaders by Australian band Player One. Saunders grabs the synthesizer bassline played at the beginning of the track. He then pairs this sample with his own synthesizer lead, TR808 drum beat and original vocals.
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These things inside my soul they make me lose control Goes on and on,
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formally capturing the DJ's original contribution to a dance floor megamix. On and On's loop based construction, original electronic drums and synths and lengthy 8 minute runtime laid a foundation for the genre that came to be known as house music. And crucially, pressing this track to vinyl meant this emerging sound could circulate much more quickly through clubs, radio shows and house parties. Over time, house music DJs became less reliant on disco records and increasingly favored original tracks built around synthesizers and pumping four on the floor drum machines. Among the early Chicago house classics of this era are Mr. Finger's mystery of love from 1985, Chip E's 1986 classic Time to Jack. Marshall Jefferson's move youe Body, also from 1986. And a track called what Is House? By Willy Wonka, which is a unique song that defines the genre for new audiences while explicitly documenting its origins in Chicago's black music community.
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So far, the vast majority of Chicago's dance music artists are urban blacks with a rhythm in their blood and a formula for getting people to shake their bones. They are the ones largely responsible for creating Chicago's dance music sound.
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With a solid identity and distribution, it was only a matter of time until house music grew in popularity outside of Chicago. By the mid-80s, house music had reached the UK, where it was actually embraced by larger audiences quicker than the US. As early as 1986, Chicago house pioneer Farley Jack Master Funk's rendition of Love Can't Turn around and his iconic music video reached number 10 on the UK singles chart. After house music exploded in the uk, the genre and its surrounding club culture spread across Europe. This eventually included Paris, France, where our young and impressionable duo Thomas and Guiman were absorbing these new sounds in the early 1990s. Thus, it's at this point in the history of electronic music that we can finally return to Daft Punk's homework and its many name drops on the song teachers. That's right after the break.
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welcome back to Dissect. Before the break, we traced the history of house music from its roots in disco to its emergence in underground Chicago clubs in the early to mid-80s. After pioneers like Jesse Saunders committed this sound to wax, Chicago house spread rapidly across Europe in the late 80s and early 90s, eventually reaching Thomas and Guimon in Paris, who studied the genre and its architects like textbooks and later paid homage to them on Homework's Teachers. Among the many Chicago house artists named on Teachers is DJ Pierre, a founding member of the group Future, who is best known for inventing the subgenre acid house in 1987. As we talked about last episode, this squelching TB303 bass synth played over housebeats defined the acid house sound, something Daft Punk used directly on Homework's defunct. Another early Chicago house pioneer who gets a shout out on Teachers is Lil Lewis, whose 1989 single French Kiss became a crossover hit on both the US and UK charts. The track features a single chord played in a short two bar loop accompanied by a propulsive TR808 beat. We can hear this kind of repetitive single chord approach on Homework's Revolution 909, which uses a TR909 to underscore its single chord. Sample. One specific house subgenre that gets a lot of love on Teachers is what came to be known as Ghetto House. Born in Chicago's south side and influenced by hip hop and Miami bass, Ghetto House moved away from the disco influenced polish of traditional house in favor of faster tempos, minimal industrial arrangements and explicit vocal loops. Eight Ghetto House artists get a nod on Teachers including DJ Funk Jam and Gerald, Paris Mitchell and Waxmaster, each representing a different facet of Chicago's most raw house subgenre. DJ Funk's work Dat Bodi from 1993 is ghetto house in its purest form, propulsively fast, incredibly minimal and repetitive, and made to entrance the dance floor. Jam and Gerald's pump that shit up from 1992 pushes this same musical philosophy even further, stripping the music down to rhythm, repetition and explicit energy designed to provoke an immediate physical response. Ghetto House pioneers Paris Mitchell and Waxmaster's Ghetto Shout out functions as a roll call of Chicago's ghetto house community and is actually the direct inspiration for Daft Punk's Teachers. After House and Ghetto House, the genre with the next biggest presence on Teachers is techno. Like house, techno emerged in the early 80s as a black electronic art form built around drum machines and DJ subculture. But where Chicago house prioritized warm swung grooves. Techno was birthed in Detroit specifically during a period of de industrialization and economic decline, resulting in a sound that leaned colder and more mechanical. Drawing influences from early German electronic artists like Kraftwerk. Some of the earliest techno songs came from one of the genre's innovators, Juan Atkins, whose 1985 track no UFOs helped define techno's machine driven futuristic identity. We can also hear this darker industrialism in the early techno hit the Bells by Jeff Mills, another Detroit techno pioneer that gets a shout out on Teachers. Like House, techno was welcomed with open arms overseas, where UK and German producers pushed its darker, more industrial tendencies to greater extremes. One of the most influential figures in that movement was the UK's Surgeon, another artist name checked on Teachers. Take a listen to his 1994 track Badger Bite and notice how abstract, cold and mechanical the sound is. Aside from the four on the floor kick drum, this is a long way from the warm disco inspired grooves of Chicago house. This kind of intense, frenetic industrial energy informs a handful of tracks on Homework. Let's hear some of both Roland and Scratchin and Burnin, two tracks that inherit the propulsive, dissonant abstraction of Detroit and UK techno. This wild synth on Roland and Scratchin is one of the more iconic sounds from Daft Punk's early work. It was created using a Roland Juno 106 synthesizer run through a boss heavy metal distortion pedal, an electric guitar pedal designed for extreme abrasive clipping. This heavy metal pedal was most famously associated with the Swedish death metal scene of the mid-90s, where its chainsaw like distortion became a defining sonic feature. Here's the pedal in action on Gates of Ishtar's 1996 track Inanna. Dafunk and Genius previously utilized this same extreme distortion pedal to recast their Juno as a kind of death metal synth, cranking every knob on the pedal to 10. And so what begins as a typical synth sound like this. Is transformed into this. This kind of sonic experimentation was a defining feature of both house and techno. It's actually one of my favorite aspects of these genres. Producers were constantly testing the limits of where sounds could come from, how aggressively they could process them, and how far they could push the music toward abstraction. And as long as that four on the floor drum beat was there to hold everything together, they could actually get away with quite a bit. One of the best examples of this is the music of Todd Edwards, another influential producer Daft Punk names on Teachers and whom they go on to collaborate with directly on both Discovery and Random Access Memories. Todd Edwards is best known for his hyperchopped micro sampling style, where he slices his samples into tiny fractions of a second fragments, then reassembles the parts to create dense, abstract musical mosaic. To give you a taste of how Todd Edwards composes his unique sonic collages, let's break down a little bit of this track. Perfect Love. The section we just heard is composed of 11 different micro samples from four different artists and five different songs. We'll start with this passage from 1974's I'm glad you'd Walked into My Life by the Spinners. From this passage, Edwards grabs this tiny snippet. He then pitches it down two semitones. Same process on the next sample, which comes from Steely Dan's 1978 track Haitian Divorce. From this, Edwards grabs another snippet and pitches it up. Edwards gathers six more micro samples just like this. He pulls three more samples from the Spinners album and grabs another three micro samples from Flora Perman's 1979 album Carry On. These eight samples are then creatively played as if they're individual notes in a musical scale as Edwards sequences them together to create this loop. Over this loop, Edwards places a vocal sample sequence, grabbing the words Perfect Love from the acapella version of First Choice's Let no man Put Asunder. Here's the sample source, followed by the chop. Now let's hear how all these micro samples come together over a simple house beat. It's pretty cool, right? It's an incredibly experimental and progressive approach to music making. And that four in the floor house beat is the glue that holds everything together, making an otherwise abstract combination of sounds not only palatable, but danceable and infectious. Thomas and Gimon were big fans of Todd Edwards, even seeking a collaboration with him on Homework. Edwards declined, so Daft Punk essentially did their best impression of him on Homework's High Fidelity. Daft Punk employs Edwards micro sampling to create the melodic loops throughout this track. The vast majority of the samples are sliced out of Billy Joel's 1977 song Just the Way youy Are.
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I take you just the way you are.
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Of course, you'd never know this was the sample source. It sounds nothing like High Fidelity because, like Edwards, Daft Punk are slicing out the tiniest of sample fragments. For example, the song's main loop is 2 seconds long, yet it contains 7 different samples, meaning each sample is on average, less than 3/10 of a second. The first one is pulled from this passage. The chop is grabbed in the transition between I and Would now Let's shorten it even more. That's it. That's the first sample chop. Pretty wild, right? The next slice comes from this passage. So here we grab the ba from the word bad. And now let's hear this. Combined with the first sample slice, this same intricate process repeats five more times, resulting in these individual chops. And now let's hear them all sequenced together. Again. I just have to stress how weird and experimental this approach to music making is. It really pushes the limits of what is and can be considered musical, because any one of these chops on their own don't sound musical in the traditional sense. Yet when sequenced with intention and glued together with a four on the floor 909 beat, it somehow transforms into magic. Of course, not every sample based song on Homework is this complex, but it doesn't mean that it's any less skillful. As we'll see this entire season, Daft Punk has an intuitive knack for identifying samples, I.e. hearing a portion of a pre existing song and both recognizing its potential and then having the technical ability to execute on maximizing that potential. As an example, let's take a look at Homework's third track, Revolution 909, a title that flips the Revolution 9 from the White Album into an homage to the TR909 drum machine and the revolution it sparked in electronic dance music. But this reference actually goes deeper than a clever pun, because The Beatles Revolution 9 was an early experiment in musique concrette, a piece of music built from tape loops, found sounds, spoken phrases and studio effects layered into an abstract sound collage. In this way, Revolution 9 precedes and anticipates the same collage based musical approach Todd Edwards would later apply to dance music.
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Number nine, Number nine. Number nine, Number nine.
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Daft Punk's subtle nod to the Beatles and specifically to their early experimentation with electronic music, aligns perfectly with Homework's central idea of teachers paying homage to the artists who expanded what recorded music could be by experimenting with new technology. As for daft Punk's Revolution 909, its sample history begins with Sheryl Lynn's 1978 disco hit Got to Be Real. This instrumental was interpolated in a 1995 remix of Fun Factory's song Celebration. Interpolation works like sampling, but instead of using the original recording directly, the part is replayed or recreated. Daft Punk grabs just a half bar sample from this track and then they pitch it up quite a bit, which also increases its speed. When looped, it sounds like this. There's also A second loop that uses this same sample, but this time pitched down and triggered with some syncopation. Now let's hear these loops in action as they appear on the album. Those two loops, both pulled from the same 1 second sample and laid over a 909 beat, are essentially the entire composition, stretched and developed over five and a half minutes on paper. That might sound simple, but in practice, it requires every bit of the skills that composing music with traditional instruments does. Because like all music making, sampling is equal parts technique and taste. You need the technical ability to chop, stretch, tune, sync and process sounds. But you also need the ear to recognize a fragment's potential in the first place. That means listening to hours of music, selecting the one second that feels transformative, and then using your technical skills to make good on your intuition. All the masters of sampling, from Frankie Knuckles to Kanye west to DJ Shadow, they all have this in common. Some of the grades didn't even have the best technical skills, but their ear for samples mattered more than virtuosic technique. Daft Punk, of course, would prove themselves to be masters at both. And Revolution 909 is just one early example on homework. There's also an especially impressive sample flip on track five, Phoenix. Though you'd never guess by just listening to the song. Phoenix's primary sample actually comes from an ELTON John Song, 1976's Don't Go Breaking My Heart. The sample is grabbed from this small section of the passage we just heard. This is trimmed even more until we get this fragment. This is our main sample, which is then pitched down three semitones. Daft Punk also grabs just the tail end of the sample to use as its own kind of rhythmic stabilizer. The main loop is constructed with these two samples, the full hit followed by a few syncopated stabs. Daft Punk, of course, put their magical cocktail of effects on these samples. And when once again, combined with a grooving 909 beat, those abstract samples somehow become the lead instrument on an infectious loop. Now, about midway through the song, Thoma and Gimon do something pretty ingenious. Take a listen to this bass line they introduce. So this bass line isn't exactly what it appears to be. It's not produced by a bass guitar or a bass synth. It's actually created from that same Elton John sample they used in the main loop. Let me show you how they did it. So, first, Daft Punk, isolate this snippet of the sample. Next, this small sample fragment is essentially turned into an instrument by a process called chromatic mapping. This is where a single sample is pitched up and down and assigned to keys on a keyboard or pads on a sampler, which allows you to play the sample like you would any other pitch bass instrument, like a piano or guitar. And that's what Daftunk does. They play that sample fragment like a bass guitar, creating this bass line. Of course this doesn't sound like a bass yet. That is until you remove all the high and mid range frequencies from the sample and then boost the low frequencies to the max. And that's how this. Becomes this. These kinds of audio magic tricks are all over Homework, and they reveal something important about Daft Punk's so called student phase. While the album's educational theme is accurate, Thoma and Gimon weren't simply imitating their teachers, they were actively reimagining what they learned throughout the record. They absorbed the history of house and techno all the way back to disco loops and drum machines, then add to that lineage through their inventive sampling, innovative processing, and expert song development. Like the greats before them, Daft Punk stood with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, helping to define what electronic dance music could become even at this early stage of their career. Of course, I say all of this about Homework, yet I haven't even talked about the biggest song on the album, the track that truly made good on Daft Punk's mainstream potential. It's a song built without samples, entirely original in its composition, and centered around the first iconic use of a robotic voice that would go on to become a signature of Daft Punk sound. Of course, this is Homework's classic disco inspired track around the World, a song we'll examine note by note, line by line, next time on Dissect.