Cole Kushna (6:43)
This was created by what's called a Talkbox. Developed in the 1960s, a talkbox is literally a small metal box that contains a tiny but powerful speaker inside. An instrument like a synth or guitar is plugged into the box, and the speaker inside forces the sound of the instrument through a long plastic tube that runs from the box to the player's mouth, where you shape the sound with your lips and tongue, making it sound like your instrument is talking. Stevie Wonder was an early adopter of the Talk Box, famously helping to introduce it to the public during his appearance on the David Frost show in 1972. But around the world, Daft Punk most likely ran their Juno 106 synthesizer into the Talk box, where they would have played this riff on the synthesizer. While Thoma mouthed the words around the world. Around the world. And while it's not the actual recording, there is a video of Thomas in the studio playing around on a Talkbox in 2002. And at one point, he jokingly starts to sing around the World, giving us a glimpse of how it was actually recorded. All right, so to recap the individual parts and around the world, we have two drum parts and a tambourine, two bass lines, three synth parts, and a talk box. Now, you can think of these like pieces of modular furniture units designed to lock together in different configurations, because that's exactly how Daft Punk used these parts, mixing and matching them to build a compelling seven minute track that's far less repetitive than it first appears. Let's now start to track exactly how they do this, starting with the intro. Now, to create this intro, Daft Punk isolated the tail end of the main bassline and looped it. So here's the main bass line again in full. Now let's crop out just that descending riff and loop it. Functionally. This section of the bassline is written as a transitional fill, a phrase designed to bridge the part back to its starting point. On its own, it's very unstable. There's nothing solid to latch onto. It simply generates forward motion. But when that motion is looped over and over, it creates anticipation, which is exactly what you want at the start of a dance track. You build tension so that when the main section finally drops, it feels like a release. To intensify this effect, Daft Punk placed a low pass filter over the intro, an effect that strips away the high frequencies and mutes the sound as if the track is playing from behind a wall. And as we'll hear next, Daft Punk gradually opened the low pass filter, allowing brightness to slowly seep back in. It's like a Blurry image coming into focus. And when paired with the inherent tension of the bass loop, it creates mounting anticipation. Okay, so I purposely cut this off just before the drop. And hopefully you feel that tension like the feeling you get just before you sneeze. Now let's hear the payoff when after 30 seconds of build, the beat finally kicks in with full clarity. Sam? It feels good, right? So there's just three elements here now. The disco beat, the main bassline, and the bouncy synth. And as we just heard, this combination plays through two full cycles before a new combination appears. At this moment, that new combination is simple. They add the Wasynth into the existing loop. Obviously not the biggest change, but at this point in the song, a big change isn't needed. We're still enjoying being locked into the groove after the tension and release of the intro. Now, after two cycles of this new combination, another element is added to the mix. And this begins to reveal the song's central organizing principle. Because around the World doesn't have a typical verse chorus structure, but rather it's organized in these two unit cycles. Every two cycles, a change is made, either large or small. That new combination is then played for two cycles. Then another change is made. This two cycle rule sustains the entire song, but it's so subtle that it never becomes predictable. In fact, I never even noticed it until tediously mapping out every part of the song for this episode. And here's what's really cool about this Daft Punk. Never repeat the same two cycle combination of sounds in the entire seven minute track. Musicians listening right now will understand the magnitude of that statement. But for those of you who don't make music, just know this is not easy at all. Most songs repeat entire sections more or less verbatim, sometimes multiple times in a song. So to create what is essentially a seven minute instrumental song without repetition using just a handful of elements is a feat. One that was surely intentional on Daft Punk's part. To me, the song's construction feels like an inside joke in that it's deeply repetitive in its materials, but never repetitive in its structure. That paradox is around the World's unspoken thesis and its technical brilliance. So, having revealed this skeleton key to the song, let's continue to track these never repeating two cycle combinations. The next change is another simple addition to the existing mix. This time it's the Talkbox. Once you understand the song's paradoxical relationship with repetition, the phrase around the World starts to feel tongue in cheek, a nod to its loop based construction. Each part Cycles endlessly like planets in orbit. People move around the world, the world moves around the sun while spinning on its own axis. The very order of the solar system is loops within loops within loops, just like the song. Now, after two cycles of this new combination, the drums change from the disco beat to the closed hi hat beat. It's a somewhat lateral move that decreases the dynamics just a tad. We'll hear just the tail end of that cycle before the next more dramatic change when everything drops out except the disco drumbeat and the bass line. I wouldn't call this a breakdown, but it's definitely the first dynamic decline of the song. Until this point, parts were being added. This is the first big subtraction. This creates the opportunity to build the song back up, which is exactly what happens in the next set of cycles. The around the world talk box returns with the closed hat drum part, which is followed by the biggest change of the song yet. For the first time, the bassline switches to the busier funk part, infusing the track with additional energy accompanied by the disco drumbeat and the return of both the bouncy synth and wa synth. This is the dynamic peak of the song so far. Having earned their way to this peak, Daft Punk ride it out nearly verbatim for another two cycles. However, careful listeners will notice that they do make a subtle addition, keeping consistent with at least one change every two cycles. This time it's the tambourine, which shows up here as its only appearance in the entire song. See if you can hear it in the background. Alright, so by now it's likely you're getting an idea about how this song is constructed with these different modular 2 cycle units. I'm not going to walk through every single one, but I definitely would suggest listening to the entire song with this in mind, noticing how they use all these different combinations to create dynamic highs and lows and tell an engaging seven minute musical story that never loses your attention. It's a fascinating song that is again, intentionally paradoxical in its construction, using extreme repetition at the micro level, while being not at all repetitive at the macro level. This concept actually became the creative inspiration for the song's iconic music video directed by Michel Gondry. Gondry recognized the song's loop based construction, saying, I realized how genius and simple the music was. Only five different instruments with very few patterns each to create numerous possibilities of figures, always using the repetition and stopping just before it's too much. Gondry's video quite literally brings the song's loops to life. Each of the track's five instruments drums, bass, synth, guitar like synth and talkbox are represented by a different group of characters, each performing choreography that mirrors their specific musical role. The bass appears as a group of large, muscular men, the bouncy synth is represented by synchronized swimmers. The drums take center stage as mummies, the guitar like synth becomes skeletons, and the talkbox, of course, is embodied by robots. Also, you'll notice that the stage itself is circular, reinforcing the looping nature of the music, while also evoking a spinning vinyl record. Watch closely and you'll see that every character's movement is locked precisely to their individual musical part. For example, the bass characters climb three large steps, mirroring the bassline's three ascending notes. Then they quickly descend down smaller steps, a visual translation of the busy fill that loops the bassline back to its beginning. Like the song, Gondry's video is meticulously designed, yet deceptively simple, almost homemade in appearance. The choreography is a composite of individual parts, each character performing its own loop, locking together to form a whole. It's a perfect visual expression of the song's modular design. The around the World video also marks the first time Daft Punk paired robots with a robotic voice. It wasn't a deliberate statement at the time, but it did subtly foreshadow the transformation that would soon change everything about how Daft Punk presented themselves to the world. More on that right after the break. Daft Punk's Homework was released to the public on January 20, 1997, but as we documented last episode, the album was self funded and created in Thomas bedroom studio, despite a number of major labels wanting to sign the duo off the strength of their single Defunct. This was by design. Thoma and Gimon didn't want a polished studio sound. They wanted to maintain the underground approach of the house and techno scenes they loved. Famously, Thomas and Gimon didn't even have studio monitors, instead running their mixes into a ghetto blaster boombox that Thoma got as a kid, with the logic being that if it sounded good on that, it would sound good on anything. Thomas told Mix Magazine at the time. We're very keen on recording in the bedroom, not going to studios. It was very seductive to do that with a major company. All the more if it goes on the charts or whatever, you can do some really lo fi stuff with two drum machines and an old synthesizer and put it out on a major label. That's seductive as well. Playing with the rules when we started it was more economic. We didn't have the money, but now it's the reason in itself. We do it because we want to. It wasn't until Homework was essentially complete that Daft Punk signed a deal with Virgin Records in September of 96. But this wasn't a typical major label deal, as Thoma and Gimon leveraged their bidding war to land a unique artist friendly contract. Rather than signing away ownership, they licensed Homework to Virgin through their own imprint, Daft Records. They also established dedicated creative and production arms, Daft Art and Daft House, to maintain control over their visual identity. Virgin handled manufacturing, promotion and global distribution. But the music, the imagery and the creative decisions were all owned by Daft Punk, who were also self managed at the time. Thomas said, quote, we like to think we give ourselves more control, although we could be wrong. Managing ourselves isn't a problem because we've known each other since we were 14. And we've discovered that a lot of bands that we like from the 60s and 70s that were on major labels had a lot done to their songs without their consent. We don't want anyone telling us how to make music. In the late 1990s, at the peak of major label power, this level of autonomy was almost unheard of, especially for a new act. And Daft Punk would never waver from this model, maintaining both business and creative independence for their entire career. Now, along with Homework, Virgin and Daft Punk re released Dafunk as a single with broader distribution and importantly, a Spike Jonze directed music video. The video received regular MTV airplay during a time when music videos really mattered, introducing Daft Punk to a much wider audience.
