![]() Over the next 10 years – most notably with Discovery in 2001, a legacy-cementing tour in 2007 and the mystique-enhancing break they left in-between (not to mention all that came after) – Bangalter and Homem-Christo became the steel-and-silicon giants they'd wished themselves into being, while unwittingly setting the stage for a different type of machine altogether.ĭaft Punk's music is and always will be formidable, but the roots and future of its legacy aren't yet crystal clear. The pair, born Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, began making music in the early '90s, raving through that effervescent decade and leaving it, with the release of Homework in 1997, in a blissed-neon glow. If Is This It-which scored a 9.1-got bonus points for delivering on the Strokes' early hype, Room on Fire deserved just as many, plus an extra 0.1, for confidently marking progress and at least partially thwarting rock history's most inevitable backlash.On Monday, the ur-French-dance-music duo Daft Punk announced – via the slick and typically cryptic video above, featuring a dramatic self-destruct sequence – that it was hanging up the helmets and leather jackets for good. Plus, best of all, Julian Casablancas remembered to write choruses this time. ![]() ![]() And where drummer Fabrizio Moretti once did such a convincing impersonation of a Roland TR-707 that many listeners assumed he was one, here he added fills to his repertoire and pushed tempos for dramatic effect. (Said Pitchfork at the time: "NYC’s finest have all but given birth to an identical twin.") But under the same glaze of Gordon Raphael tape hiss, Room on Fire was a different, better album with major improvements over its predecessor: Lead guitarist Nick Valensi played on his entire fretboard, instead of just hiding out near the root notes like he did on Is This It, artfully embroidering (and sometimes outdoing) the primary melodies. The Strokes’ second album was received as a minor letdown because it supposedly sounded too much like the band's debut, Is This It. It didn’t push pop music forward it merely opened the door for countless Moroder cameos and convinced Pharrell that what the world really needed was a 24-hour “Happy” video. ![]() RAM has some jams, but it doesn’t feel pivotal in the same way that Discovery did. It’s not that people aren’t listening to it the album has racked up nearly 1.5 billion plays on Spotify alone. Throw in Italo-disco godfather Giorgio Moroder solemnly recounting the story of his life, and who could dare to doubt the monumental gravitas of the duo’s fourth studio album? Mark Richardson’s review acknowledged the hype while attempting to look beyond it: “My guess is that people will be listening to Random Access Memories a decade hence, just like we’re still listening to Discovery now.” Eight years later, I’m not so sure about that. Then, too, there was the whole issue of Daft Punk’s much-ballyhooed return to vintage disco played on “real” instruments, which, set against the neon backdrop of the early-’10s EDM boom, felt like a big deal. There was that seemingly interminable campaign of singles and sneak peeks the 15-second ad on Saturday Night Live the inescapable “Get Lucky,” an earworm so wormy that it’s probably burrowing effortlessly into your brain right now. Sit back and imagine what the Lana of 2012 would get clowned for now: Singing the opening lines of Lolita? Ordering a “Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice”? –Anna Gaca There is a lot of room to miscalculate some weaker tracks show up toward the end, and the singing is sometimes less than polished-the best early-era Lana material is the follow-up Paradise EP-but Born to Die turned out to be a sign of things to come, like genre-agnostic pop ballads with hip-hop beats, and the arch, depressive languor that’s more mainstream than ever. Lana is reaching for something: the fulcrum point where the fear and pain of sexualization start to work as leverage. The future looks pitch black and you glide right in. But late one night that summer, I set out for a long drive, slid a burned CD in the player, and realized the open road feels like Born to Die, all smooth glossy surface and the riskiest danger around, the kind where you’re the victim. It’s hard to describe how overheated the discussion around Lana Del Rey was in 2012, when critics eyed her femme fatale persona with cynicism and you couldn’t scroll a Tumblr dashboard without passing a flower crown.
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