Daft Punk - 'Homework'
No. 9 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Parisian-born duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem Christo have been friends since meeting in school in 1987. Fans of The Beach Boys, T. Rex and FM radio hits of the 1970s and ’80s, they combined a wealth of tacky and lucky influences into some of the most devastating and fun music of all time. And it began with Homework, a distinctive mash-up of electro beats, hard techno and disco house that tapped into the collective unconscious of old school funk, recognizing the future in the past.
“We wanted to make something for people to listen to in their bedrooms,” Daft Punk once said of their first album. “Maybe if they have homework to do. Or want to relax.” This is a tidy definition of Homework, but it’s also a classic bit of French irony — the art of meaning the opposite while sincerely meaning the literal at the same time, or maybe. Homework was simultaneously tough and sweet, ranging from hypnotic dance workouts to washing machine grooves. ‘Daftendirekt,’ ‘WDPK 83.7 FM’ and ‘Revolution 909′ kicked things off magnificently, from rumbling, churning, beastly funk — to the sweet refrain of “musique!” — to a banging house club being crashed by party-pooping gendarmes, or cops — a situation to which any partier might relate.
British magazines like Muzik received Daft Punk with open arms. The young Frenchmen, 23 and 22 at the time, were indeed punk rockers of a kind, speaking their minds and disarming and flipping the U.S. pop-rock music game. “I really love that FM sound," Bangalter told Muzik’s Calvin Bush, demonstrating both a real savvy and high sensitivity to pop sounds. “It’s totally different from Europe,” he continued. “You get into your car and the sound is brilliant. There’s so much bass compression, it makes the voices go all deep and the sub-bass makes them go even lower."
They were keen listeners. When asked why they gravitated to house and techno, Bangalter explained that it was the shock of the new and the anonymity that actually made much of the difference. “I think it happened because it was so exciting going to clubs and listening to records you didn’t already know,” he told Bush. “That was the difference. You’d go to a rock club and they’d have all these leaflets telling you the names of all the bands they played. You’d go to a house club and you would know maybe only three or four tracks all night.”
De Homem Christo, the quieter but more biting of the pair, always bringing that more social commentary to bear, the key that opened the door to Bangalter’s music, noted: “With most rock gigs in Paris, you go to the gig, you don’t dance, you don’t speak too much, you’re in the dark and then you go home. With dance stuff, you can meet people. It’s a living life not a dead life.” Which sums up the Daft Punk philosophy perfectly. In essence, the purpose of music is social. Yes, it may entail cracking psychological frontiers or breaking cultural barriers. But it’s about movement.
In April 1997, the British music journalist David Stubbs reported from Los Angeles for Melody Maker on Daft Punk’s crash across the Atlantic to the Pacific. “The French Revolution,” the editors dubbed his “Fantastic Plastique” story on the cover, a fun pièce de reportage that Stubbs played to the hilt. Wearing plastic masks in their Sunset Strip photoshoot, it’s a more innocent and candid peering into their deft ironique souls than would follow in years hence; “Funk You” it starts, with a deft account by Stubbs of his first-hand encounter with an LA taxi driver following a performance by Daft Punk at an LA club — turns out the cabby was a fan too.
“It’s very nice, but…pfff,” Bangalter later signaled to Stubbs during a sit-down interview at the Argyle hotel in West Hollywood. “If it had been up to us, we would have stayed in some little sleazy motel, y’know, out of town. Some place with atmosphere. That would have been more us.” And of course, such romantic aspirations about deserts and the West would later inspire Daft Punk’s cult adventurism in the form of kino sci-fi robot elegy, Electroma, of 2006.
Deep down was the seed of that subversive countenance. “It’s OK, but once you’ve seen three or four pictures of these guys, it gets very boring,” De Homem Christo remarked to Stubbs about grunge rock’s mid-1990s muddle. “Also, it’s one of the rules, and we want to break rules.” Bangalter picked it up from there. “Since the beginning, we’re trying to do our own thing, not showing our face,” he affirmed, “showing we can do it with just music, that the music can be popular, not us.”
“Bear with them and their lo-fi house backbeat unfolds as subtly as systems music becomes not an irritant but a trance, taking you from plastic to primal in easy stages,” wrote Stubbs of their inventive pop incursion. “‘Around the World,’ the new single, is a classic case in point. When I first heard it, it seemed too silly. Now barely an hour goes by without it dancing through my head, from ear to ear, like a techno pied piper.” And yet Daft Punk also knew how to strike a slight balance with rock too. While Stubbs lampooned the pop distortions of grunge on MTV and radio, more even than The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk knew how to rope-a-dope rock fans to the beat.
“The second wave of post-’88 grunge died away with Nirvana,” Stubbs so declared. “And the third wave, the Offsprings, the Green Days, the No Doubts, have the outer garb and posturing of teen rebels but are clearly as much the visual projection of record company board meetings as the characters in any Coca-Cola or Nike ad campaign.” The listening stacks and end-rows of the Virgin Megastore in West Hollywood were filled with the likes of The Prodigy, The Chems, Underworld, Morcheeba, “Et, bien sur, Daft Punk.” American tastes were at last shifting.*
“Guitars out, samplers in, rock out, dance in,” Stubbs rifled with an ironic wit. Unrelentingly, the debate was ricocheting across music magazine offices, radio DJ playlists, movie soundtracks and fashion catwalks. As Melody Maker’s Martin James noted, even though Rolling Stone magazine was finally paying attention and giving print space to “electronica,” this latest “British Invasion” was not assured. Surely enough, it would not quite stick, even if it softened up the rock resistance — no, fatefully, it would take the French to strike the final blow; and with their slick nonthreatening flows, disarm radio and MTV with their sick, rollicking licks.
Breakout single ‘Da Funk’ whipped through snarling riffs while the global hit ‘Around the World’ circled to a happy melody walking with sprightly feet. Together, the two songs put them on the world stage. The former was prized among DJs, featuring heavily in The Chemical Brothers’ DJ sets.** The latter benefitted from a surreal, imaginative music video by Michel Gondry that ran on MTV around the clock. Instrumental and quieter moments like ‘Fresh,’ with its cooing electric guitar, simultaneously betrayed not only a hint of melancholy but a versatility of fun Californian vibes, style and mood. A music video by Spike Jonze played up hallucinations of doggy blues, sandy shoes and Hollywood street moves.
And far from being arrogant, ‘Teachers’ gave shout-outs to influences as disparate as George Clinton, Brian Wilson, Jeff Mills, Green Velvet, DJ Hell, Paul Johnson, Ashley Beedle, and Dr. Dre. But it was techno-house monsters like the screeching ‘Rollin’ & Scratchin,’ the squelching ‘Rock ‘n Roll’ and the warping ‘Indo Silver Club’ that made Homework an uncompromising fist in the air. And it all comes down to closer ‘Alive,’ Daft Punk’s anarchic anthem for the ages — music that would scare kiddies, upset pets, and alarm parents of any generation. On the robot march, it’s a slamming trip into the beyond, shuddering with a primal prowess that blows through the walls of everyday reality, burning atomic bright at the deep core of a wilder dimension.
From the stop-start funk of ‘Daftendirekt’ to the whirly disco-house of ‘Burnin’’ to the werewolf-ing ‘Alive,’ Homework was head-work as much as it was body-work. For in classic Daft Punk fashion, the duo had taken their name from a Melody Maker review of their first single, a cover of The Beach Boys’ ‘Darlin,’’ which dismissed their music as “daft punk.” Turning the criticism on its head, the pair had headed back to the drawing board with a perfectly self-effacing name as well as a carte blanche to surpass and blow past everyone’s expectations — to go interstellar in a way.***
Ever wary of the spotlight, they wore animal masks and robot suits in photoshoots to outsmart pop fascism — these were cats, or dogs, that would rather DJ a house party than book a half-time show at the Super Bowl. There’s a pattern here. Daft Punk have been consistently underestimated by critics and fans alike. In 2001, XLR8R magazine ran a long editorial screed against Daft Punk’s Discovery outing, their sophomore album, bemoaning its corrupting pop tropisms. The author couldn’t see past the sincere French irony, the album’s embrace of over-the-top guitar solos, and its promiscuous embrace of bubble-gum hooks; but upon careful listen, it was yet another supreme manifesto that went on to influence artists across the globe.
As perhaps the best album of the first decade of the 21st century, Discovery exploded the mainstream consciousness around the exciting possibilities of electronica married to the bloodstream of popular music, helping birth “EDM,” a phenomenon that Daft Punk would publicly regret. Rightly or wrongly, that revolution, as Stubbs predicted, started with Homework. He put his finger on the pulse — cleverly articulating the “future confusion” they invited and embodied. They beat the game of fame.
“Merely DJing, Daft Punk start inauspiciously,” Stubbs wrote of that little club in 1997. “They’re not loud enough. The foppish technophiles jabber over the top, one or two exchanging glances as if to say, ‘This is what the fuss is about?’ Then, as if by sheer cumulative attrition, the bouncing backbeat gets right inside your head, right inside your bone marrow and I’m in a roomful of hypnotized, jigging, nodding dogs, me as much as anybody. I get it. They get it. We all get it. Let’s all get it together.”
Twenty years after such sneaky nights, Bangalter and De Homem Christo found themselves at the vanguard of not just electronica, but pop. Along with electronic pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre and pop artist Serge Gainsbourg, they’re also the biggest French music exports since Claude Debussy and Édith Piaf. Too few outside of France took French music seriously, at least in America, until Daft Punk showed the “uncultured” and the untraveled, the musical errors of their ways.****
And in just one decade, Bangalter and De Homem Christo influenced everyone from LCD Soundsystem and Madonna to Kanye West and the Black Eyed Peas. That’s the genius at the heart of Daft Punk, that double entendre at the core of their groove. What at first seems like homework is tomorrow’s old school — avant garde funk masquerading as infectious party music for the masses.
Track Listing:
1. Daftendirekt
2. WDPK 83.7 FM
3. Revolution 909
4. Da Funk
5. Phoenix
6. Fresh
7. Around the World
8. Rollin’ & Scratchin’
9. Teachers
10. High Fidelity
11. Rock’n Roll
12. Oh Yeah
13. Burnin’
14. Indo Silver Club
15. Alive
16. Funk Ad
*I worked at the Virgin Megastore on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood from 1996 to 1998, and I can corroborate Stubbs’ reporting that British “electronica” was in full swing on the shelves. As the resident “electronica” expert, I recommended albums regularly to curious new purveyors and some celebrities here and there. Actors like Ethan Hawke regularly came in (barefoot). Ben Stiller would fill his basket with CDs. When I started, most co-workers thought I was an alien. By 1998, that puzzled countenance was less so. And yet, Hawke and Stiller never stalked my zone.
For a young American like myself, with Asian and European roots, and who had lived in France from 1989 to 1991, working at that particular Virgin Megastore in LA was an indispensable “education” — I was in college and I worked there not just for the cash, but because it had the biggest “Import” selection of any store, including a probably 100-foot double row of 6-deep racks dedicated to “Electronica.”
As a raver and zine music journalist, it was there that I greatly expanded my own collection of electronic music, buying albums and singles on employee discount. The section I managed pulled in electronica from around the world: so I first came across the French scene there via Yellow Productions’ Source Lab compilations, and Dimitri From Paris’ Sacrebleu and Motorbass’ Pansoul, both albums from 1996.
I have never believed in just receiving free music or promos as part of my journalism work. I have always felt compelled to buy and support artists, especially given that “electronica” has been in some form of fledgling for three decades. Besides, as a journalist, you only get generally what you are assigned at first. And getting the promos for free I believe inculcates a cynical attitude about the music.
This disconnection with the artists economically and “contractually” I believe can make it too easy to forget that most artists are also investing their own cash and their futures into their projects at great risk. Lastly, looking back on my own relationship as a consumer and observer of the electronic music revolution, I am grateful for the time I spent at Virgin Megastore. Just as I left that job, online stores arrived.
**Daft Punk returned the favor at The Chemical Brothers’ request when they delivered probably their best and one of their few remixes for another artist, transforming The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Life Is Sweet’ into a trippy laidback tech-house classic.
It is also important to point out here that Daft Punk got their big break via Glasgow, Scotland’s very own Soma Quality Recordings, the groundbreaking stalwart techno and house label owned by Slam (DJ’s Stuart McMillan and Orde Meikle), who penned the 1993 classic, ‘Positive Education.’
It is fitting then, that they released Daft Punk’s first dance record in 1994, The New Wave, which included a version of ‘Alive,’ and co-released Homework with Virgin, as their original benefactors and champions. Meikle on Daft Punk: “The definitive sound of teenage funk!”
***There are various different accounts of how Daft Punk came up with their name, but one of the best is in Calvin Bush’s Muzik article, which was titled “Daft Punk: Frog Rock,” where he played up the whole punk and rock angle. In his story, he gets the goods from Bangalter directly:
"When we were about 17 or 18, we made this tape which was a cover of a Beach Boys song,” Bangalter told Bush. “We just recorded it at home with guitars and a drum machine. No melody, just the chords.”
“The band Stereolab were coming to Paris and we really liked them because they had these incredibly cool seven-inch singles,” he continued. “So we gave the tape to a girlfriend of ours who then passed it on to Laetitia from the band.”
"Stereolab put it on a compilation single they made with bands like Huggy Bear, Colm and Stereolab themselves. Just 1,500 copies. It got a very bad review in Melody Maker, basically saying that Darling was 'a bunch of daft punk'."
****One of the more hilarious parts of Stubbs’ classic profile of Daft Punk, a piece he would cull some for the intro to his 2018 book, Future Sounds: The Story of Electronic Music from Stockhausen to Skrillex, concerns France’s Minister For Rock:
“Given that the country appointed a Minister For Rock, it’s strange that France had made such a pitiful contribution to pop and rock culture,” he wrote of the absurdity. “It’s a bit like the Germans having a Minister For Comedy.”
Perhaps a bit unfair, to the French and the Germans, but even Daft Punk bemoaned their state of affairs at the time. Noting that the leading French rock magazine gave them their worst review for Homework, Bangalter observed with some despair, “Sure, there was a Minister For Rock, but the worst thing for kids is for the Government to get involved with rock.”
And in no offense to Germany, Stubbs, a fan of German culture, draws a distinctive parallel between Daft Punk and Kraftwerk — in terms of their sound and their unabashed embrace of stark synths, vocoder vocals and popular ambition.
In fact, from my perspective, Kraftwerk at least, is more humorous to my mind than Daft Punk, who seem more preoccupied with pre-adolescent nostalgia. Kraftwerk songs like ‘Pocket Calculator’ are dry sendups of rock’s self-seriousness.
Also, it should be noted, that France has had other notable “exports” of popular music. Serge Gainsbourg, for one, was a major force in pop music and has grown in influence internationally over the years. He was a dominant influence in France from the 1950s through the 1980s. And in the 1990s, predating Daft Punk’s breakthrough, MC Solaar gained major notoriety as he pushed the art form of rapping in the French language, and helped spark an innovative and vibrant movement of French hip hop, helping give voice to the immigrant experience and the French African diaspora.
With the success of Daft Punk and MC Solaar, a great number of other French artists rose into the global ether, including Air, Phoenix, Dimitri From Paris, Kid Loco, IAM, NTM, Pépé Bradock, Justice, Mr. Oizo, Busy P, Cassius, Bob Sinclair, DJ Cam, and Senegalese singer Baaba Mal (via the French system).
Last but not least, Bangalter’s short-lived side project Stardust put out a little song called ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ in 1998 on his own Roulé label. Its feel good vibes and lyrics made a huge mark on the global dance scene. It has been released and reissued 59 times and counting.