Daft Punk/Brooklyn/icanneverlistentomusicagain

Daft Punk’s set in Brooklyn on Thursday night was beyond the normal adjectives describing such things. The normal descriptions of amazing, earthshattering concerts do not apply. Yes, Daft Punk’s set was downright apocalyptic. People would have kept dancing as a nuke hit central Manhattan, but even more so than that, Daft Punk’s set was a big fuck you to the apparent end of music as we know it.

The digital age, the decline of the record store, the death of the major labels, the rise of absolute pop crap, the ever-changing irrelevance of once prominent genres (dance), Daft Punk does not care. They do not care that they are electronic musicians, impure in their rejection of live instrumentation. They do not care that they are pop icons, subverting the music video and pop imagery for their own purposes. They do not care about their last albums bad reviews and initial fears of their decline. They do not care about any of this. They have two goals, make you dance, and make everyone else look pathetic. They are not just playing their music; they are putting on a show. The lights, the effects, and even the crowd are just as important as the music, and in its totality, this was absolutely ridiculous.

The set blew the famous one from 2006 Coachella away, approaching two hours with intense starts and stops and the most epic encore I have ever witnessed. They felt more live than when you usually listen. You could hear them actually arranging things with whatever samplers and keyboards they had. If you listened extremely closely, you could hear 3 or 4 missed cues, little inconsistencies, proof that they were working up there. This meant you could literally feel them turning knobs and pushing buttons. And the lights…fuck…the lights…yea…you just have to see that shit….

This was the closest thing in my lifetime to understanding what it would have been like to see Hendrix or The Beatles live. The show they are putting on now absolutely puts to shame everything else going on in music. They are touring, with no hit record, no hit single, no hit video, and no apparent goal than to simply conquer all of metropolis. There were groups of teenage girls at this concert. Not cool musical prophet outcast teenage girls but popular image driven partying teenage girls. Not all of them could have possibly known what they were going to (“just the group who did One More Time”), but, seeing a group of them rush over to buy t-shirts at the end of the show was an enlightening experience. It made me realize, you could take all the teeny bopper die-hard fans, and throw a show with Britney, and Christina, and Justin, and Kelly, and basically anyone you dared, put them up against Daft Punk, and Daft Punk would win all the fans away. Easy as pie. In the age of the lip-sync to help with your dance moves and computer enhanced backup tracks, Daft Punk are the true pop heroes. Right now, they are doing something very different in music. You should take notice.