Daft Punk vs. Massive Attack

Leigh mentions that the humanity of the so-called Bristol sound is what defines it, along with its socially aware attitude.  Daft Punk (think Human After All) is all about humanity!  Just like Kraftwerk, Daft Punk's songs are inexplicably in pieced-together English, and, like Kraftwerk, Daft Punk sends a vaguely political message.  In the end, though, Daft Punk is all about having fun:  Human After All is probably less about racism than a riff on their hugely famous robot costumes.  I mean, they're probably more related to Richard Wagner and his idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art: they dig the total work of awesome, performing as they do in a totally sick triangle.

Daft Punk's influence's influence's influence (at least)--maybe the great-grandfather of French techno?

Edgar Varèse, the maybe-father of electronic music, was born in France in the nineteenth century.  His music, blurring as it does the boundary between electronic music and the normal sort, begins to describe what we might call the essential characteristic of electronic music:  noisiness.  His music, like Stockhausen's, is an exploration of sound and noise; unlike Stockhausen (who does claim to be influenced by Varèse), Varèse flirted with Dadaism and Surrealism before finally becoming grounded in his own musical language.  Before electronic music became a genre unto itself, Varèse acted upon electricity as a tool for making the jarring, unusual, and abstract music that he had previously only tried in such works as "Ionisation," a piece solely for percussion.

Varèse was still tied to the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, though.  Like them (in particular the group of six French composers who, like Satie, tried to establish a new musical language modeled on the rhythms of jazz), Varèse was obsessed with rhythm and timbre, as is evident in his "Poème electronique," a sort of amplification of Le Corbusier's glorified powerpoint presentation.  In evidence is the abstraction, the collage, and the isolated meaningfulness of sound, as well as his earlier quasi-Dadaist sentiment:

Daft Punk's influence: Primal Scream

I find myself, like Daft Punk, getting a little repetitive when I say again that Daft Punk is all about mixing:  their music is a mix of styles, genres, and eras.  Their influences are then obviously varied, ranging from the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson to Romanthony or Bob Marley.  But a major influence in terms of genre was the album Screamadelica by Primal Scream.

Primal Scream was a British band and major member of the acid house scene in the nineties.  Their career merged their early indie rock aesthetic and finally their dance/ house aesthetic.  Their song "Movin' on up" was immensely popular and serves as a good example of their mixture of rock with dance:

Stock-friggin'-hausen and Daft Punk (also John Adams?)

Dearest Liz,

I read your post about Stockhausen and I thought I'd share some thoughts (because I think he is awesome).  Alex Ross, in his short name-dropping session here, draws some attention to Stockhausen's enormous Gruppen (1955-1957).  I mention this mainly by way of saying that Stockhausen and the (at the time) new world of electronic music was still entirely an extension of what snobs call the classical tradition (their fusion is evident as recently as in John Adams's Doctor Atomic).  This is because electronic music, like so much of the other music of the twentieth century, is obsessed with music as sound:  the simple, quasi-scientific abstraction of sound in space, of waves and collisions and overlapping interferences.  More than most, Stockhausen was absolutely enthralled by this abstraction.  In his review of the performance of Gruppen, Alex Ross describes how the the space is almost as important as the music:  audience members are advised to change seats in between the two consecutive performances so as best to hear the spatial interaction between the three competing orchestras.

Just as Doctor Atomic is a sort of collage of various traditions and cultures (featuring as it does such varied sources as Baudelaire, the Bhagavad Gita, the sonnets of John Donne, and the musical traditions of Wagner, Stravinsky, medieval religious music, and pop songs from the forties), Daft Punk's music is a collage of international phenomena (there's an alarmist video on Youtube decrying Daft Punk's samples from terrible pop music that no-one listens to).  Their music, which is predominantly transformed from others' inferior work, is a sort of collage of international tendencies and fads that serves as a cute analogy to France's increasingly varied and international culture that finds the warriors of tradition dug in against the polluting influence of foreigners.

Stockhausen was a little bit of a fad himself, but electronic music has so far survived without him.  Stockhausen, even into his later years (he died in 2007), was such a mixture of odd parts, avant-garde German intellectual and hippie (he was called the Pied Piper of the Youth at some point), that he never really found a lasting base.  His abstract, unpopular philosophizing of September 16, 2001, on the events only five days earlier combined with his claim that he emanated from the star Sirius made him a kind of collage.

Interstella 5555, the animated House Musical

Interstella 5555 tells the story of an alien band that is kidnapped, taken to Earth, and made famous.  Their memories erased and put on disks, the band, mind-controlled by an evil manager, is finally saved by a loyal fan who gives his life to return them to their home planet.

As a sort of document of Daft Punk's musical universe, Interstella 5555 provides more than adequate fodder for some thoughts about identity.  The heroes obviously stand in for Daft Punk (besides performing Daft Punk songs, the end of the movie sees the camera slowly zoom out from a close-up of a "One More Time" record playing).  Daft Punk's views on pretty much everything are thus revealed to us:

5.  Daft Punk does it for the music and for the fans.  Besides the guitar-glorification of most of Daft Punk's music the blue-skinned band featured in the movie has not one but two guitars.  Their music, which is in some ways a celebration of pop culture throughout the ages (guess the origins of the samples in this, for example), is a kind of mélange of international past and present.

5.  Daft Punk is international.  The band in the movie begins by playing to a crowd of people inhabiting a planet entirely composed of blue-skinned people.  Their unity is destroyed when they are transformed (on Earth) into a band composed of some white guys and some black guys.  On Earth as well as on blue-planet, though, their popularity goes beyond race and nationality.

5.  Daft Punk is also nationalist/sectionalist.  The band in the movie urgently wishes to return to their home planet (country?).  The end message of the movie seems to condemn meddling in the affairs of others.

5.  Music will transform the world and bring peace.  The loyal fan (who dies to save his band) flies around in a sort of spaceship guitar, bringing peace to our band and freeing the innocent.  The unity in the crowd in the opening scene of the movie is mirrored by the unified gyrations of the crowd at the end.

It might also be worthy of note that Interstella 5555 was a thoroughly international venture, composed half by the French Daft Punk and half by the Japanese animator/director Takenouchi.

As requested

A very brief tour of Jewish history in Europe and some thoughts:

In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain.  At the time, anti-Semitism ran rampant.

Jews became citizens in the French Revolution (though the general anti-religion sentiment during the Terror obviously made times tough); Napoleon laws creating a sort of mini-Jewish state in France, but also declared all debts to Jews annulled and other such discriminatory laws (in 1808).

Jewish situations across Europe differed in the nineteenth century; France was fairly tolerant, but in, say, most of what is now Italy Jews were confined to ghettos until around 1870.  In the late nineteenth century, there are two developments:  zionism (Herzl) but also the Dreyfus affair.

I need hardly dwell on the Holocaust, where approximately six million Jews were killed, but the twentieth century also saw the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.  There are currently approximately 2 million Jews now living in Europe.

The most interesting aspect of anti-Semitism throughout European history is its transformation from a religious discrimination to a racial one.  I'm not sure about this last part, but I believe that it happens some time around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; the anti-Semitism of Wagner would have been dispelled had Jews converted to Christianity, but the anti-Semitism of Hitler was racial.  It would make sense if this corresponded to the pseudo-scientific ideas that abounded about racial hierarchies and such around the turn of the century, but I have no evidence to support this.

Some sources:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Europe

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/France.html

and the textbook

Before I get started on Daft Punk

...I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about what sort of things could make them characteristically French.

--Foreign attitudes

The French colonial effort was centered around the French-ification of the colonized.  Even today, the attitude of the French towards their immigrant population is hugely different from the American one.  Whereas Mexican immigrants are still Mexican in the United States, French immigrants become French when they immigrate.

The present-day French attitude towards immigration is different from that of the immediate post-war period.  Even though France, since 1973, has not encouraged immigration (and, for some periods of time, positively discouraged it) to France, its political attitude towards foreigners is not xenophobic like in the United States.  (This is not to say that there are no xenophobes in France; there is widespread xenophobic sentiment, at least according to Ms. Guiraudon.)

In her paper, Ms. Guiraudon obliquely refers to the growing globalization that has slowly been expressing itself in Europe.  When hundreds of Kurdish immigrants were beached on French shores, the British were upset because they suspected that the Kurds would be headed to Great Britain.  That is to say, France's coast is the last stronghold of European integrity.  France's politicians were then torn:  to speak against illegal immigration or to express solidarity with the refugees?  Their different reactions highlights the dual expression of France:  France at home and France abroad, as part of a greater Europe.

Decolonization totally sucked for everyone

Decolonization sucked for the western powers because they lost all their colonies! But Great Britain and the other western powers did maintain a pretty serious amount of influence in the Middle East and Latin America and Africa and pretty much everywhere, so it wasn't the end of the world for them.

It also looked like an opportunity for ze Russians because of all these new governments coming onto the market.  It was an opportunity for communism! But the USA did a pretty good job of installing autocratic, fascistic states in the place of old colonies.  Bummer for the Russians!

Decolonization at least initially sucked for the ex-colonies because of all these foreign interests and stuff.  In the long term it sucked, too, because the ex-colonies had to deal with national boundaries and things like that that weren't really very accurate reflections of where nations should lie and stuff like that.

So you know how everyone goes like, "Man, the thirties were the dishonest decade, la la la?"

The problem that France, England, and the USA had to deal with during the Second World War was that of their uneasy alliance with the Soviet Union.  Before the war, one rationale for the appeasement of Hitler's insatiable territorial appetite had been the creation of fascist buffer states in eastern Europe that could halt the expansion of Soviet Communism.  The war didn't change anything; before the war we allied with the fascists against the communists, during the war we allied with the communists against the fascists, and after the war we allied with the fascists against the communists.  (Not to keep harping on the same tune, but Tim Weiner in Legacy of Ashes mentions that most of the CIA agents that were recruited in eastern Europe were either ex-Nazis or otherwise undesirable.)  This is why the forties were totally the dishonest decade.

My version of our argument

Argument:  It matters that Daft Punk is French.  As a French band, they conform to (maybe even represent) French social, cultural, and political values and imperatives.

And, for kicks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZeRqcTO_do&feature=related