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- [00:08]
Cole Kushner
From the Ringer Podcast Network. This is dissect long form musical analysis broken into short, digestible episodes. Today we continue our season dedicated to Daft Punk's entire catalog with a deep dive into Human after all and the Alive 2007 Tour. I'm your host Cole Kushner. This episode is brought to you by AT&T. At AT&T the iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone right now. @&t. Ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone. Trade in any condition requires trade in of iPhone 15 or higher excluding iPhone 16e and 17e requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.com iPhone for details. This episode is presented by ATT. At ATT, the iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone right now at ATT ask how you can get an iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone. Trade in any condition requires trade in of iPhone 15 or higher excluding iPhone 16e and 17e requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change. Visit att.com iPhone for details. Last time I dissect, we completed our analysis of Daft Punk's Discovery, a project universally recognized today as one of the most important albums of the 21st century. It's a record that reimagined electronic music by collapsing entire musical worlds into one, pulling from rock, classical, pop and disco, and in doing so expanded what dance music could be. However, the way we view Discovery today was not exactly the way it was received back in March of 2001. One More Time had dropped a few months prior, and despite its commercial success, its pop accessibility and heavy use of autotune left fans of Homework skeptical of where the duo might be heading, dreading the possibility that Dafunk were selling out both themselves and house music writ large. And then Discovery drops just a few months later and it's not an album full of one more times. But it's not homework either. And so, like many forward thinking works of art, its reception, while mostly positive, fell short of the universal acclaim it enjoys today. Mixer magazine celebrated the album's experimental spirit as brave and completely commendable, while the A.V. club dismissed parts of it as not so much fun as it is silly. But perhaps the clearest contrast between past and present comes from Pitchfork which originally gave discovery a tepid 6.4 in 2001, only to revise that score to a perfect 10 in 2021, admitting that the original review is invalidated by the historic record. Indeed, Discovery is great art, and history has a way of rewarding great art, even when it's not fully understood in the mom.
- [03:30]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
One more time.
- [03:35]
Cole Kushner
Now. Along with the music, the Discovery era is also responsible for birthing Daft Punk's now iconic robot Personas. Thomas and Gimon spent months developing their helmets with special effects artist Tony Gardner, who worked on films such as the Addams Family and Hocus Pocus. Thomas Helmet was inspired by two of his favorite films, 1976's Phantom of the paradise, which featured a silver masked musician as the lead character, and 1951's the Day the Earth Stood still, whose eight foot tall humanoid robot character donned a futuristic silver helmet to reflect his talkative nature. Thomas Helmet originally featured an LED panel that could display words he typed into a controller strapped to his arm. Gimon's helmet was inspired by NASA's Apollo era gold faced space helmets. And because he was more reserved, Gimon's vertical LED panel didn't display words, but rather abstract shapes and designs. When it was time for Discovery's press run, Daft Punk fully committed to these robot characters, showing up to interviews in full costume and relaying their origin story how their transformation was due to a sampler exploding in their studio on September 9, 1999 at exactly 9:09am, an homage to the Roland TR909 drum machine.
- [04:46]
Thomas Bangalter
Well, it's the first album we're making as robots, so I don't think it's completely robot music, but it's true that it's really now the mix between the computer systems and the new chip we have in our brain, mixed also with the fact that we still have a heart and a heartbeat. So I guess it mixes the machine and the human side of what we are.
- [05:15]
Cole Kushner
As we discussed back on episode one, Thoma and Gimon's robotic transformation, caused by a technical malfunction, played on the very real fear around Y2K at the time, an event that came to symbolize just how intertwined humans had become with their technological creations. That relationship was inherent in Thoma and Gimon's robot characters, but they wouldn't really develop that theme until their next album cycle. Instead, they spent years working on an anime film that was scored entirely by discovery in Track 2003's Interstella 4. 5. The story of the Secret Star System. As I'VE mentioned a few times this season. Daft Punk conceived Discovery as part of a larger visual project from the very beginning. Their original idea of a live action film eventually evolved into an anime, leading them to collaborate with the highly respected Japanese director Leiji Matsumoto, the creator behind many of the cartoons Thoma and Gimon loved as children. In this sense, working with one of their childhood heroes fits perfectly within Discovery's core theme of 70s nostalgia, an experience Thoma described as a childhood dream come true. The film tells the story of an alien band from a distant galaxy who are kidnapped by an evil human music producer who's seeking supernatural power by collecting 5,555 gold records, the band is brought to Earth, their memories are erased and they're rebranded as human pop stars known as the Crescendolls, exploited for their talent and turned into global celebrities. With these themes of colonialism, the loss of identity and exploitation, the film is clearly a cautionary tale about the music industry, which in the early 2000s was still at the height of the major label system. It was a story Daft Punk could tell authentically, as they largely avoided this system by rejecting a lucrative major label deal in favor of a licensing agreement allowing them to remain independent and retain creative control and ownership over their work for their entire career. Conceptually, what makes Interstella 4.5so unique is that it contains no dialogue. The music of Discovery is the true language of the film, effectively turning it into one of the earliest true visual albums. For example, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger scores the alien band's transformation into manufactured pop stars, with its robotic, mechanical vocals reflecting the loss of their identity as they're literally processed and repackaged by the industry. Another standout moment is Something About Us, which underscores one of the film's most emotional scenes. As the hero Shep lays dying, the song's lyrics become his final words, revealing his love for fellow band member Stella. Recontextualized within this narrative, the song's wordless outro takes on new meaning, depicting a dreamlike afterlife where Stella and Shep are reunited, dancing together in the sky.
- [08:08]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
I love you more than anyone in.
- [08:23]
Cole Kushner
Now, as we've witnessed all season, Daft Punk love a good twist, Be it an unexpected metal tapping guitar solo or a record scratching hip hop breakdown in Interstella 4. 5. This instinct shows up narratively in the film's final moments. After the story resolves and the Crescendals return to their home planet, the camera begins to pull back out from the planet through the solar system and into deep space before hard cutting to a close up of a spinning Discovery vinyl on a record player, as if the world of the film was contained in the record. We then see that the album is being played by a young boy who fell asleep on the floor while playing in his room. He's surrounded by toys that resemble the characters from the film, the implication being that everything we've just witnessed was actually the boy's dream, a fantasy world inspired by the music, as Discovery quite literally scored his sleep. At face value, it's a cliche. It was all a dream ending. But within the world of Discovery, it's anything but. Because as we know, Discovery is a nostalgic homage to the sounds that scored Thoma and Gimon's childhoods. And the end of the film stays true to that premise. Only now Daft Punk's music becomes the childhood soundtrack for a new generation. In this way, the ending of Interstella 4. Five foreshadowed the enduring legacy of Discovery itself, the sounds of Daft Punk's past beautifully and lovingly reimagined, becoming the nostalgia of the future. Interstella 4. 5 publicly revealed daft Punk as storytellers, establishing a critical, if often overlooked, dimension of their creative work that would remain a priority for the rest of their career. Released in 2003, some two years after discovery dropped, the film marks the beginning of the end of Daft Punk's Discovery era, which was formally capped off with an album of Discovery remixes called Daft Club, released at the end of 2003. In 2004, Daft Punk went dark again, turning their attention to what would become their next era. And if there's one consistent pattern in their work, it's that whatever comes next sounds nothing like what came before. Their debut single, the cold techno driven the new wave, was followed by Defunk, a hip hop inspired synth anthem. Their debut album, Homework, was a focused study in underground house and techno, while Discovery attempted to reimagine those genres entirely, leaning much further into pop, nostalgia and eclecticism. And this reactionary pattern continued with Dafunk's next project, one that deliberately took the opposite approach to Discovery, where Discovery was guided by a philosophy of infinite possibilities and its influences, its instrumentation and its production techniques. This time, Daft Funk inverted that idea, imposing strict boundaries on themselves. Limited time, limited tools, and a deliberately constrained sonic palette. The result was the most controversial album of their career, a record that was intentionally challenging, unpolished and bleak. In short, it was everything Discovery was not. It was 2005's Human, after all, Daft Punk's Human After all was released on March 14, 2005, and if it weren't for the occasional vocoder voice, you'd be hard pressed to believe it was made by the same duo behind Discovery. Where Discovery is warm, nostalgic and perfected, Human after all is cold, mechanical and raw. Where Discovery is full of samples, Human after all has just one. And where Discovery is optimistic, full of wonder, hope and fantasy, Human after all is pessimistic, a deliberately dreary depiction of an emotionless, technologically driven future. And like it or not, all of this was by design. Thomas said the album was not supposed to make you feel good, comparing its unpolished nature, to quote a stone that's unworked. They gave themselves just six weeks to make the album, primarily using just two guitars, two drum machines, a vocoder and an eight track recorder. Thomas framed this intentionally constrained approach as an attempt to find infinity inside the square, a way of forcing innovation by limiting available resources. The result is something that feels like it was made by a traditional band, where each member has their defined instrument and role. So rather than every song being its own sonic world like Discovery, Human after all has a very distinct homogenized industrial sound where the same gritty, distorted instruments appear across nearly every song. Even the album's only sample based track, Robot Rock, slots perfectly into Human After All's distorted universe. In fact, it fits so seamlessly I was shocked to discover that it's built from one of Daft Punk's most straightforward samples, with the core of the song lifted directly from 1980s release the Beast by Breakwater. Here's a back to back comparison. Now. The thing about building an entire album around a singular sound is that it invites a polarizing response. If you connect with that sound, you're likely to love the album, but if you don't, it can be hard to connect with any of it. And that's exactly where many listeners landed with Human After All. Unlike Discovery, which was met with generally positive reviews despite some detractors, Human after all saw the inverse. Many critics were lukewarm, some were openly harsh, and none were entirely positive. The Guardian called it a joyless collection of average ideas stretched desperately thin, while mixmag went even further, writing that it sounded as if Bengal Terr took a holiday and let his four year old son loose in the studio with a toy sound machine. The album's failure to connect with some audiences was compounded by the fact that Thomas and Gimon chose to not give any interviews after its release years later they would acknowledge that decision to be a mistake. But at the time, Thomas there was a clear rationale behind it. In 2013, Tomah finally explained, Human after all was a dark album inspired by the oppressive world of George Orwell's 1984. For example, the song Television Rules the Nation explicitly references the overwhelming presence of media in our daily lives. It would have been obscene and inconsistent to give numerous media interviews to point out the omnipresence of the media. Thomas would also tell the Fader as much as the first two albums were entertaining, we felt like the third album was about this feeling of either fear or paranoia. It's not a fun record. It's not something intended to make you feel good. These two quotes begin to unlock the larger thematic premise of Human after all, which, regardless of how you feel about the album, is absolutely essential to the broader narrative Daft Punk were building through their robot Personas. On one hand, Human after all is deeply cynical. Thomas comparison to George Orwell's 1984 speaks volumes as that novel famously depicts a terrifying world of total surveillance and governmental control, where individuals are stripped of identity and reduced to obedient, interchangeable parts in a system dominated by technology and media. This thematic thread is explicit in songs like Television Rules the Nation, Brainwasher and Technologic, where Orwellian ideas of control and media saturation are not only reflected directly in the lyrics, but also the music's cold, mechanical tone.
- [16:53]
Daft Punk (vocals from Technologic)
Upgrade it, charge it, on it, zoom it, press it, snap it, work it quick, erase it, bite it, get it, paste it, save it, load it, check it quickly, write it, play it, earn it, flip it, crack it, drop it, unzip it, feel it.
- [17:06]
Cole Kushner
This latter song, Techno Logic, is especially effective in communicating the album's central concept. The track repeats a stream of rapid two word phrases buy it, use it, break it, fix it, mimicking the repetitive, task driven logic of machines. As the music video makes clear, they're not lyrics as much as they are commands of a menacing robot at work, a loop of emotionless instructions where every action is devoid of any real experiential value and they just keep coming, one after another, forming a kind of endless rapid scroll. In this way, the song feels prophetic, resembling the infinite scroll of social media, a digital marketplace disguised as a town square where human interaction is flattened into entertainment and commerce controlled by algorithms. Now it's possible the portmanteau Technologic is a nod to the book Technopoly by Neil Postman, a prominent thinker in media theory in the late 20th century. Published back in 1992 Postman argued that modern society had become a culture dominated by technology, where it dictates the terms of life rather than serving as a tool. He writes, technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. In my reading of the track, Technologic embodies these same themes and sound. Led by its half human, half synthetic vocal, the song depicts a world where the line between man and machine is indistinguishable, where meaning is sacrificed for efficiency, where human behavior is reduced to coding commands and human reasoning is replaced by technologic. Understanding. Human, after all, as a deliberate attempt to sonically and thematically capture a frightening technological future, is valuable context going into the album, one that can deepen your appreciation, especially if the sound doesn't immediately resonate with you. But to frame the album as entirely that would be an incomplete reading, because the project's darker moments are deliberately set against flashes of genuine humanity, or at least the striving toward it. In songs like Make Love and Emotion, we hear a softer side of our half human, half robot characters, as if searching for something meaningful amidst the rigid conformity of their mechanical environment.
- [19:39]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
Sam.
- [20:07]
Cole Kushner
This softer side of the album is crucial to our understanding of its core theme, which is explicitly suggested in the album's title, Human After All. It's a play in the phrase I'm only human after all, which is typically said after making a mistake, implying that imperfection is an essential part of being human. But after all also implies a conclusion, something realized in hindsight once everything has been considered. It's often used when revising our initial judgment, when we say something like it wasn't so bad after all. In an album centered on the tension between humanity and technology, the implication seems to be that after so much technological progress and integration, realizing the value of our humanity, our imperfections, our emotions, our mortality is a necessary conclusion if humanity is to survive at all. Because if we continue down a path steered only by technologic, these traits will continue to be sacrificed in the name of efficiency and optimization.
- [21:03]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
We are human after all, After all.
- [21:20]
Cole Kushner
Curiously, Human after all is placed first in the tracklist, an ironic way to open the album. It's a similar trick to Discovery, beginning with one more time and encore performed at the start. Likewise, Human after all, with its implications of finality, feels slightly tongue in cheek. But in my reading, this placement reveals something larger about the album's structure like the film Pulp Fiction, it's my opinion that Human, after all, begins at the start of its ending. And that ending continues into the album's second track, the Prime Time of youf Life, where our half human, half robot voices urge us, almost command us to recognize the value of being alive, to realize that the prime of our life is always right now.
- [22:06]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
Don't wait and live it today. Don't wait and live today.
- [22:20]
Cole Kushner
In this interpretation, the prime time of your life serves as the album's narrative endpoint, its thematic conclusion and final statement. To make full use of the human experience, you've been gifted. The track even ends like a true finale, with a chaotic crescendo as the percussion accelerates faster and faster until it totally collapses in on itself. I mean, that sounds like a finale to me. And in this reading of the album, the next track, Robot Rock, marks the true beginning of the narrative, a clear establishment of the robot's mechanical world. From there, the album unfolds through a cold, technologically driven landscape until it reaches its final track emotion, where something human is rediscovered. This leads us back to Human after all and Prime Time of youf Life, which in this reading is a thematically connected three song sequence that closes the story, reaffirming our humanity. In this sense, the album functions like an Ouroboros, a self contained loop where the end feeds back into the beginning. Humanity creates technology, technology begins to consume humanity, and only through that process do we arrive at the realization of what it means to be human after all. Now, because Human after all is such a sparse album, I understand if your instinct is to push back against this interpretation, but by the end of this episode, I think you might be convinced. Because Human after all, the album is just one part of a larger creative statement Daft Punk were building during this era. The album would soon be contextualized with a second feature length film and one of the most significant live shows in modern music history. We'll break both down and how they complete the story of Human after all, right after the break. This episode is brought to you by Warby Parker. A family member of mine was trying to buy glasses online recently and it turned into a whole ordeal. There are so many styles that it's honestly overwhelming and you're just staring at these tiny pictures, trying to guess what will actually look good on your face. Then the prices hit and it feels kind of wild to spend hundreds of dollars on something you're not even sure is going to work. Work. But Warby Parker completely flipped the experience. They've simplified everything. Quality, price, selection, all of it. And their virtual try on is surprisingly accurate. Such a game changer right now. Buy one prescription pair and get 20% off any additional prescription pairs at warbyparker.com dissect. That's 20% off additional prescription pairs when you go to wabyparker.com dissect
- [25:16]
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- [27:16]
Cole Kushner
just over a year after releasing Human After All, Daft punk premiered their second self funded full length film, 2006's Electroma. This time around, Thomas And Guimon would direct the film themselves. A full circle moment for two artists who first bonded over their love of movies as teenage like discovery to human after all, Electroma is the polar opposite of the vibrant, plot driven musical Interstella 4 5. The film is incredibly slow, stark and entirely without dialogue. In medical terminology, OMA refers to a tumor or abnormal growth, so the title Electroma suggests a kind of cancerous expansion of technology within human life. Guided by this central concept, the film places Daft Punk's two robot figures in a surreal, desolate future where we first see them driving across an empty landscape in a car with license plate that reads human. The metaphor is clear. These half human, half robots are on a journey to reclaim their humanity. They arrive in a town populated entirely by identical robot figures. A world of perfect uniformity that symbolizes the loss of identity in a society driven entirely by technological conformity. Next, they enter a sterile laboratory like facility where unseen figures perform a mysterious procedure that grafts human faces onto their robotic heads. When they emerge from the facility after the operation, they carry themselves with a newfound confidence, strutting through the town to a playful fung instrumental. But the townspeople are disgusted by their human faces. They stare and judge, eventually forming a mob to chase them down. Meanwhile, the duo's artificial faces begin to melt under the sun. And ultimately their attempt at restoring their humanity proves unsustainable. The Electroma has grown too large, both socially and physically. The world is no longer fit for human life. The two then take refuge in a public restroom where they confront the impossibility of their desire and tear away the melted masks. Cast out and alone, they wander into the desert. Eventually, one robot asks the other to press the power switch on his back, willingly shutting himself down. Left alone, the remaining robot attempts to do the same, but can't reach his own switch. Then, in a final act of desperation, he removes his helmet to reveal a circuit board in place of a face, implying that at some point humans had decided to replace their brains with electronics. He then smashes the helmet on the ground, uses a shard to reflect the sun and sets himself on fire. In the end, the only human quality left to preserve is mortality. And only in death do the robots become human. After all. Like human after all, Electroma isn't intended to make us feel good. Its slow pace strips away the hyper stimulation of modern entertainment, forcing us to sit with a possible near future, a cautionary tale that reminds us of the value of our humanity. Something that must be consciously preserved as we become increasingly tethered to technology. Now, as their second album, Linked Film, Electroma solidified Daft Punk's interest in world building, creating exploratory, interconnected works that approach the same themes from different angles, each filling in the gaps at the other. And what their next major installment made clear is that these worlds weren't isolated projects. Rather, they were starting to form a connected body of work, a larger narrative unfolding across albums, films, and soon, performance. Indeed, with this next endeavor, Homework, Discovery and Human after all, are reassembled into a single continuous experience, a historic spectacle of music, light and story that reframes their entire catalog as a three sided triangular superstructure. A pyramid, if you will. It was daft Punk's Alive 2007 tour. Daft Punk's Alive 2007 tour and its debut at Coachella 2006 is one of those rare historical moments in which there is a clear before and after. It's a definitive marker not only in Daft Punk's career, but in the evolution of electronic dance music, a moment often referred to as a Big bang for the genre. The origins of the show trace back to 2006, when Daft Punk were invited to Coachella by the festival's organizers. Having turned them down for years, they were offered an unusually large sum of $350,000 to perform, which Daft Punk saw as a unique opportunity to help fund their ambitious visual concept. We can actually see an early version of what became the iconic pyramid stage in the music video for Technologic, where a grotesque robot shouts commands from the top of a red pyramid structure. Working in absolute secrecy, Thoma and Gimon collaborated with the video's director, Martin Phillips, to bring this structure to life, constructing a state of the art pyramid that measured 18ft across and was covered with high resolution LED screens. Extending outward from the pyramid were two triangular grids of LED lights positioned in front of a full stage LED curtain that covered the entire backdrop. At the time, LED lighting wasn't nearly as common as it is today, making the scale of its use in Daft Punk's show especially novel. There was even a rumor that they caused an LED shortage in North America, which wasn't actually true, but it shows you the kind of mythologizing that would happen around this show. The pyramid would make its historic debut at Coachella on April 29, 2006. Because Daft Punk didn't tour Discovery, it was their first live performance in nearly 10 years and their first costume as robots. Daft Punk weren't the headliners that night, nor were they booked on the main stage. Instead, they performed in the Sahara tent, which held around 10,000 people. But as Daft Punk's set began, Word spread quickly around the festival crowd, and an estimated 40,000 people ultimately witnessed the spectacle, many forced to watch on screens outside of the tent. Here's music journalist Michelangelo Matos describing the scene in the Daft Punk documentary Unchained.
- [33:28]
Michelangelo Matos
And no one had seen anything like that. They were at a completely higher level just in terms of production than everybody. Everybody who was in that tent was texting everybody else. This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. Oh my God. Everybody I know who was a dance person was like, yeah, my phone blew up that night. Like, you're missing the greatest performance of all time.
- [33:52]
Cole Kushner
In 2006, we were still a year away from smartphones, but thousands of fans in attendance recorded grainy footage of the show on their flip phones and digital cameras, many uploading their clips to a new video sharing site called YouTube, which had launched just a year prior. The result was the first viral moment in live music, A fragmented fan shot documentation that sustained and expanded the legend of the performance far beyond the festival itself. As a result of the hype, Daft Punk expanded what was initially planned as a one off show into a full scale tour and live album. Now, the impact of the Coachella premiere and subsequent tour has been widely documented. It set a new blueprint for live electronic performance, merging music, visuals and stage design into a single unified experience that would influence a generation of future artists. However, what remains severely underappreciated about Daft Punk's pyramid centered live show is how they intentionally use the stage as a vehicle for dramatic storytelling, both in its music and visual spectacle. Alive 2007 is the moment where everything Daft Punk had been building toward as musically centered artistic storytellers finally coalesced into a singular expression. And it's this aspect of the show I'd like to highlight as we start to dissect its set list and visuals. The show begins with a totally dark stage where a vocoder voice repeats the words human and robot over and over. Aligned with the themes of human, after all, and electroma, this introduction establishes the theme of the show. Humans versus Robots. Man versus Machine.
- [35:41]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
Human. Robot. Human. Robot. Human. Robot.
- [36:10]
Cole Kushner
As we just heard, the space between the words human and robot gets shorter and shorter, and until eventually they are heard simultaneously, the symbolism here is clear. The entire introduction reflects the convergence of humanity and technology over time, giving birth to the half human, half robot creatures we now see inside the mysterious futuristic pyramid structure. Then, as the first song kicks in it becomes clear that in this battle of man versus machine, it's the machines that have gained the upper hand as the duo launch into their first full track, Robot Rock. Now, we've talked a lot this season about Daft Punk's sense of timing, their ability to hold back great ideas until the exact right moment, rather than diluting them through overuse and repetition. This same moment making instinct is applied to the visual cues of their light show. Because when Robot Rock finally hits after that incredible slow building introduction, most artists would use that cathartic musical moment to unleash the full power of the Pyramid's LED system. And no doubt that would have created a hell of a moment. However, the downside to that approach is that dynamically your show has nowhere to go. You reveal your entire hand from the jump, and for most acts, that's totally fine. But this is Daft Punk and Daft Punk are storytellers. Daft Punk understands the power of restraint and the importance of pacing and crafting a dynamic experience that unfolds over time. And so the lights that accompany the dramatic drop of Robot Rock are incredibly scaled back. In fact, they don't trigger a single one of their thousands of LED lights. Instead, it's just standard can lights, and they're not even colored, just plain white, giving the audience just brief flashes of the full stage structure, preserving the mystery and deepening the sense that something bigger is still to come. The next song, Technologic, reveals a little bit more here. Daftfunk unveiled a massive LED curtain spanning the entire back of the stage, with the song's lyrics appearing in huge black text against a stark red background. It's a striking reveal, substantial enough to create an impactful moment, yet still restrained as the rest of the lighting system remains held back. This slow trickle approach to the show's visual elements sustained the entire performance, where each song seems to reveal and utilize a different feature of the structure, creating moment after moment after moment. It's as if the Alive 2007 stage is alive, slowly evolving from total darkness into a fully illuminated, all encompassing light show by the concert's end. It actually mirrors the evolution we traced in Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, where the robotic voice begins stiff and primitive, only to slowly transform into something superhuman, capable of things no human could achieve alone. Dafunk applied this same symbolic logic to the stage itself, starting with minimal, almost primitive lighting and gradually building toward a futuristic spectacle unlike anything audiences had seen before. Now, we'll continue to track some of these visual moments as we get deeper into the set list, but we have to briefly back up to the opening track, Robot Rock, to discuss Daft Punk's approach to the music of the show, because about five minutes into the song, something dramatic happens. After a long dramatic build, Daft Punk launched into a piece of music that had never been heard before. It loops a guitar chord from Robot Rock and combines it with a drum beat that is not in the original song. Rather, this beat is from the song oh yeah. Off their debut Homework. Oh yeah is one of the deepest cuts on Homework. To this day, it's the lowest streamed song on the project. In no ordinary world would this ever be played. Second in a set list. Hell, conventional logic would demand that it not be played at all. Yet when combined with the guitar chord of Robot Rock and preceded by that incredible build, Oya is transformed into a breathtaking musical moment that totally transcends its original form. This recontextualization of oh yeah. Reveals the musical approach Daft Punk took to their entire set, where not a single one of their songs is played verbatim as they appear on their albums. Instead, they viewed their songs and the individual elements of those songs as modular units that can be combined to create entirely new compositions. Thomas told Pitchfork in 2007, we really tried to reinterpret every song so that they connect to each other. We have always strongly felt there was a logical connection between our three albums, and it's great to see that people seem to realize that when they listen now to the live show. Daft Punk create moment after moment using this modular approach to their catalog, creating surprising combinations that breathe new life into their tracks, be them hits, deep cuts, or often combinations of both. Early into the set, they combine Television Rules the Nation with Crescendos, a completely counterintuitive pairing that somehow works to create an exhilarating crescendo. Daft Punk also composed new original material to use alongside loops of their existing songs. One of the most effective examples of this happens in the mashup of around the World and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. They begin with a fairly straightforward rendition of around the World, giving the crowd a chance to latch on to the first true hit of the night. The standard version of around the World runs for just over a minute before Daft Punk began to shift the arrangement subtly, introducing an original synth sequence played on a Moog synthesizer they kept inside the pyramid. This synth becomes the connective thread between around the World and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Listen to how they pull back around the World, hold onto that synthesis, and bring in the iconic vocoder from Harder, Better. After establishing Harder, Better into the mix, the remainder of the piece is a seamless fusion of the two iconic tracks, with that synth acting as a constant anchor, allowing them to move effortlessly between around the World one moment. And Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger the next. This piece comes to a dramatic climax at the end, where Daft Punk looped the opening of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. And pair it with a new vocoder arrangement, rapidly repeating fragments of the lyrics. Work it longer, work it faster. Now listen to how this relentless vocal repetition locks in with the loop and the fully unleashed synthesizer, pushing the energy to a breaking point and bringing the arrangement to a breathtaking, explosive conclusion. I mean, it's absolutely incredible. A complete reinvention of two already brilliant songs fused into something that transcends what either could be on their own in a live setting, and there are countless moments like this throughout the set. And what makes them even more remarkable is the fact that not only did they work as individual mashups, Daft Punk were also thinking narratively and thematically about how they all fit together to outline a larger story. In that same Pitchfork interview, Thomas compared their performance to a Broadway production, saying, quote, the show, which is as much a musical experience as a visual experience, is very structured and precise. Following a strict setlist, it uses, in a way, an abstract narration for a duo as elusive as Daft Punk. Quotes like this are invaluable, because once you recognize that the setlist contains a loose narrative, the logic behind the set order and song pairings begins to reveal itself. As we've already established, the show opens by clearly defining its central human versus robot, and early on, the robot appears to be in control. The opening run of tracks leans heavily into the robotic identity. Robot Rock gives way to technologic, then television rules the nation, forming a trio of songs rooted in technological dominance. That thread continues with the industrial machinery of Steam Machine, followed by the around the World Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger mashup where Daft Punk used the robotic vocoder of both tracks to comment on a globalized, overworked, technologically centered population. A critical turning point arrives shortly after this moment in the pairing of Short Circuit and Face to Face. As we discussed last episode, these two tracks were supposed to create one of Discovery's most overt narrative moments in the abandoned live action film, where the digital malfunction at the end of Short Circuit leads into a climactic confrontation in Face to Face, only to reveal that the enemy was internal all along. In the Alive 2007 set, this same pairing returns with a similar narrative function. First Dafunk layered the robot voice from Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger with the very real, unaffected human voice of Todd Edwards singing face to.
- [48:23]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
Face.
- [48:29]
Cole Kushner
So do you see what Daft Punk are doing here? This juxtaposition of a robot voice and a human voice is the face to face battle of man versus machine, human versus robot. They then use the digital meltdown section of Short Circuit to symbolize the robot's collapse, signaling a victory for humanity. Now, I need to point out that this ending of Short circuit occurs about 42 minutes into the set, a set that runs roughly 84 minutes long. That places this critical narrative moment exactly at the halfway point. And what follows this moment is a set of songs that center humanity. So that means, on top of everything else they were doing, Dave Punk have divided the entire set in 2.1/2 centered on robots and technology, the other on humans and humanity. A large form expression of the show's central theme, which, as you'll recall, is foreshadowed at the very beginning of the set when they started by repeating the words human and robot. I mean, come on, how fucking cool is that? Daft Punk even marked this division sonically. Following the digital meltdown, we hear the iconic bell tolls, that open aerodynamic signaling a transition into the second half of the set. And what follows is the first song on the human side of the narrative, a track that celebrates the joy of people gathered together, united through music and dance. Of course, at such a critical juncture of the set, Daft Punk come prepared with a visual surprise. As I noted earlier, they slow play the light show, revealing different aspects of the stage structure as the performance unfolds. And remarkably, more than 40 minutes into the set, they still haven't activated the large LED panels that cover the outside of the pyramid itself. Now, let that sink in for a moment, waiting over 40 minutes to use the lights at the heart of your stage design. The very structure the entire show is built around is the kind of decision only Daft Punk would dare to make. But in doing so, they create a spectacular payoff, saving it for the perfect moment, the thematic turning point of the show, where the now glowing pyramid is revealed during the performance of their biggest song. The second half's emphasis on humanity continues for the remainder of the set. For example, the vocals of Prime Time of your life, lyrics that urge us to live in the moment and make the most of our time alive, are layered over the track alive. But perhaps nowhere is the theme of humanity more explicit than in the set's closing mashup, which begins with the song Superheroes and its repeated refrain, something's in the Air. Recall from our analysis of this track. Something in the Air points to the superheroes of the song title, presumably flying in the sky. And in this narrative of man versus machine, who exactly are the superheroes? Who is in the air? Is it a bird? A plane? The robots? No, it's us. In Daft Punk story, humans are the heroes. And as such, the song Human, after all, joins superheroes for the set's final moments, paired with yet another visual surprise. Turns out those LED panels on the pyramid aren't just limited to pure colors and abstract designs. They can display full color images. And Daft Punk saved this capability for this exact moment, filling the pyramid with a montage of human faces of all ages and races. It's a perfect closing image, a true convergence of music and visuals as the audience sees themselves inside the pyramid while hearing themselves celebrated as superheroes. Human, after all, bringing the set and the story to a euphoric, unifying end. Now, when Daft Punk debuted this show at Coachella, this was the true end of the set. However, for the Alive 2007 tour, Daft Punk added an encore. And after such a definitive, powerful ending, you might wonder where they could possibly go from here. Well, like the ending of Electroma, they chose to remind us of an essential part of being, our mortality. Dafunk returned to the pyramid as the word human repeats a callback to the show's start. But rather than pair the word with robot, they eventually follow it with another word, die. The phrase humans die is, on its surface, a pretty dark way to end the show. But Daft Punk immediately transformed the meaning of the phrase by adding one more word. A word that comes from Thomas 2000 collaboration with DJ Falcon called Together.
- [55:11]
Thomas Bangalter
Together.
- [55:13]
Cole Kushner
Together.
- [55:15]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
Together. Together.
- [55:20]
Cole Kushner
When Dap Punk introduced this track into the encore, their full message comes into focus. Humans die. Together.
- [55:45]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
Together. Together. Together. Together.
- [55:51]
Cole Kushner
It's an incredibly creative way to express a message, chopping and arranging words that not only work musically, but actually communicate a profound final message. With only three words, Humans die together is a reminder of something we spend most of our lives trying not to think about. That all of this will end. That every one of us, no matter who you are, shares the same inevitable fate. And yet, for you to be here at all, here now, in this exact moment, is almost impossible. To be alive today, among these exact people, in this exact century, on this exact planet wide stage of civilization, requires an almost infinite cascade of events, choices, coincidences, relationships, migrations, wars avoided, wars endured, technologies invented, and bodies kept alive long enough to pass human life forward. The odds of all of this aligning, of you alive at this precise moment are so close to zero that your existence is nothing short of an actual miracle. And yet here we are, alive at the same time, floating on the same pebble in infinite space, sharing the same fleeting moment in time. Daft Punk clearly understood that a concert can be a microcosm of this shared experience. A space where thousands of people across ages and backgrounds gather to unify in music and dance, a practice as old as humanity itself. And so they built an immersive spectacle of song, light and story, whose central message is a reminder of the value of our humanity. And it's a message made all the more powerful coming from the robots themselves. Robots who in Electroma, so desperately tried to reclaim the humanity they had lost, so desperately tried to become exactly what we already are. Understood in this context, within the interconnected world Daft Punk built during this era, the message of humans die together is far from bleak. It's a unifying reminder that being alive is a privilege, that our time is finite, and that it's precisely because this ends that it matters, that we're all here together.
- [58:06]
Daft Punk (Thomas and Guy-Manuel)
Sa.
- [58:30]
Cole Kushner
As the growling synth resounds and the word together repeats, Dafunk reveal one final visual surprise. The entire stage returns to darkness just as it began, leaving only Thoma and Gimon illuminated, their leather jackets and robot helmets traced in red LED light. And as the crowd roars, they turn around for the first time all night, revealing the backs of their jackets, each bearing the Daft Punk logo, glowing in of front bright red lights. It's a literal signature, one final masterstroke placed on what will forever stand as one of the most extraordinary live performances ever created.