Daft Punk

Lichen

Well-known member
Heaven Is Where:

The French are the chefs
The Italians are the lovers
The British are the police
The Germans are the mechanics
And the Swiss make everything run on time

Hell is Where:

The British are the chefs
The Swiss are the lovers
The French are the mechanics
The Italians make everything run on time
And the Germans are the police

It's funny because it's true!


More succinctly:

French food, German car.
Never the reverse.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
the brewing of alcohol has been turned into a fine art in Europe, which has traveled far, and daily delights people world wide.

to this day Europeans make substandard porcelain which burn the hand if held with hot tea inside - a problem Chinese culture solved thousands of years ago.

due to geo-political-economic and structural causes, the vast oceanic wealth of African culture is still largely unappreciated and unrecognized by the outside world -- cultures which are in many ways more advanced, and would enrich the lives of millions.

please tell me if these observations belong in the category of "idiotic stereotyping".

OK, to expand - generalisations are fine, but when they become so rigid in your mind that you cannot appreciate that that's all they are and that life is way more complex than that, then that becomes a massive problem. Then it becomes stereotyping and idiotic.

I totally agree with your generalisation in point three, but this is much more measured than what you have said previously. What you said previously comes across as just silly 'this kind of people are 100% like this' stereotyping, which doesn't do anyone, wherever they're from, any favours, and inhibits any kind of discussion. And I don't see why you persist with it, when you have way more interesting/complex points to make, as evidenced elsewhere.

To be specific, it's just sounds stupid when you claim that Chic are rhythmically uninteresting because they couldn't be, because of the origins of the people within the band. If you don't like Chic, fine, but it's a silly way to go about arguing about it, when I'm sure you could have started an interesting discussion by telling everyone why you think that, without having to go down the 'they're not African' cul-de-sac.
 
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rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
back to daft punk for a sec, i find get lucky pretty bland all round. hopefully its just the single thats safe (and obviously heavily worked on with the knowledge that the album is a big deal) and the whole album isnt like that.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
back to daft punk for a sec, i find get lucky pretty bland all round. hopefully its just the single thats safe (and obviously heavily worked on with the knowledge that the album is a big deal) and the whole album isnt like that.

I quite like it, but broadly agree with this. Pretty shocked by the overreaction of almost my entire Twitter timeline to something that's fundamentally pretty lightweight. And why didn't they get a better singer than Pharrell?
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
yeah, pharrell as the guest singer kinda pissed me off. hes obviously made a big effort to sing 'better' on this song, but i think pharrell is best as a singer when hes singing a bit ropeily. he doesnt have the range. its like theyre trying to do it as a single like you might have in the early 80s, where a lot of care and attention has been put into it, which makes a change to a lot of big singles today, but the song itself isnt quite there. also, while i love niles as a guitarist (and all round great guy), his guitar part is just a bit perfunctory after all the hype - no real sharpness or pep to it. shame. im hoping the album isnt just like some unkle album dependent on the star power.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
in Madagascar there are these big bowl type instruments you play by holding in both hands with extended arms, and swaying back and forth. The weight of each in relation to the geometries of the human body and gravitational force determines the tempo with which it should be played, i.e. for a 90bpm tune use the bigger ones, for a 130bpm tune use one of the smaller ones, etc.

the talking drums of Yoruba tradition in West Africa can convey complex linguistic messages with rich layers of meaning, with full use of puns, metaphors and so on. Drums which at the same time provide the rhythm as well as tell a story: can you imagine the poetic possibilities and force of such an experience?

the Ngoma in the Congo are some of the largest drums on the African continent, each made from the trunk of a single tree, with the biggest in the family, the Mama Ngoma, being taller than a person, and is played horizontally, with the player sitting on top, and it is this biggest one that solos. Ngoma drums accompany funerals, weddings, and every social event and play central roles in the communcal experience.

Dance Music is not just Dance Music in Africa. Dance Music is art, poetry, communication, story telling, education, science, religion, celebration, as well as recreation and simply having a great time.

We are talking about cultures which have been perfecting ways to maximize the dance through sound, studying how rhythms affect the body, its vibrations, the intellect, the emotions, and designing specific instruments for every expressive, social purpose, for longer than all of the oldest civilizations on Earth.

This is not "racism" or "stereotyping" or "opinion" or "personal preference".

This is the central cultural heritage of our species.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
He got shown a thing or two. He came home with a lot of African music, I think. You'd have to ask him.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
in Madagascar there are these big bowl type instruments you play by holding in both hands with extended arms, and swaying back and forth. The weight of each in relation to the geometries of the human body and gravitational force determines the tempo with which it should be played, i.e. for a 90bpm tune use the bigger ones, for a 130bpm tune use one of the smaller ones, etc.

the talking drums of Yoruba tradition in West Africa can convey complex linguistic messages with rich layers of meaning, with full use of puns, metaphors and so on. Drums which at the same time provide the rhythm as well as tell a story: can you imagine the poetic possibilities and force of such an experience?

the Ngoma in the Congo are some of the largest drums on the African continent, each made from the trunk of a single tree, with the biggest in the family, the Mama Ngoma, being taller than a person, and is played horizontally, with the player sitting on top, and it is this biggest one that solos. Ngoma drums accompany funerals, weddings, and every social event and play central roles in the communcal experience.

Dance Music is not just Dance Music in Africa. Dance Music is art, poetry, communication, story telling, education, science, religion, celebration, as well as recreation and simply having a great time.

We are talking about cultures which have been perfecting ways to maximize the dance through sound, studying how rhythms affect the body, its vibrations, the intellect, the emotions, and designing specific instruments for every expressive, social purpose, for longer than all of the oldest civilizations on Earth.

This is not "racism" or "stereotyping" or "opinion" or "personal preference".

This is the central cultural heritage of our species.
I'm going to have one last go at explaining this, then butt out of this thread for good.

I really love the music that you bring to this board, and the stuff you've posted has introduced me to loads of amazing music that I wouldn't otherwise have heard. You've got a deep love for the music you bring and a lot of knowledge about it, and stuff like what you're writing above is fascinating shit that I probably wouldn't have found out about anywhere else.

However...

When you pull back and break out the generalizations - that Africans, as a whole, are rhythmically sophisticated, intuitive, emotionally pure, in touch with their traditions, while Europeans and North Americans are, as a whole, rhytmically impoverished, over-rational, emotionally constipated, cut off from their traditions - you're getting worrryingly close to an alternative spin on the classic racist, colonialist narrative of happy but primitive people who need the firm hand of civilization to make them behave properly - you're telling the same story but with the opposite value-judgement. And that makes me very uncomfortable.

I obviously don't think you support the colonialist narrative - far from it - but like pretty much everyone on here, you've spent a long time surrounded by a culture where that narrative still has a lot of currency, and, in the interests of self-criticism, you might want to step down temporarily from your assumption of your own unassailable moral superiority and ideological cleanliness and ask whether it's had more impact on your worldview than you think.

Right that's it, I'm outta here. Sorry if this reads badly, but like you said, no suagr coating...
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
What, all of it? How did that go?

iirc from reading about it on the woebot blog it kind of went how you would expect, wherever they went people were mostly bemused but would also dance after initial hesitation. I don't think they exactly converted anyone, more like a novelty, although I don't think conversion was the goal, more like let's take this music to Africa and see what happens. hopefully I'm not remembering any of that wrong. the whole thing is pretty astounding that it was conceived and pulled off. I mean I know of plenty of punk bands that have toured in South America or late-90s Eastern Europe right after the war but usually they don't bring tons of equipment and more importantly there are already established networks of venues and scenes for those bands to tour. some random English guys tooling around Africa (in the pre-internet dark ages too) with a sound system and not having it somehow go horribly wrong is pretty astounding. like a real-life mini-Fitzcarraldo. they made a film about their experiences that I would really like to see.
 

jackjambie

Voodoo Priest
yea, not sure how i feel about daft punk.

they're not like actually good are they? lots of retomania afoot with them.

the new song's fine. in fact i quite like it i guess, up until the vocoder maybe. though actually no major qualms there, sounds daft punky then at least. i didn't really realise how popular they were until this though tbh...seems like they are reaaaaalllly fucking popular actually, like maybe one of the bigger current dance acts around. does that make kanye smart for sampling them then? was that sample also a sample used by daft punk? would be great if so...

i'm guessing the album will shift a hella lot of units when it comes out. their media roll out has been exceptional so far. the hype up until the midnight release of that single was incredibly well executed i thought...you couldn't miss it.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
what i am interested in doing is dismantling the myth of Europe as the center of culture, challenge and destroy heirarchies of valuation created during the colonial era, and give criminally, systematically under-exposed African, and other, cultures more of their rightful importance and primacy within the world arena.

time and again i've said it has nothing to do with "race' but everything to do with culture.

Another way of looking at what repeatedly happens is that Eurocentric egos get bruised by my agenda, and accusations of "orientalism", "exoticization", and "romantic racism" gets dished out in retaliation.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
In this case, I'm Zhaoist. Africa has plenty of enticing cultural product to enrich and extend the global free market. Bring it on!
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
time and again i've said it has nothing to do with "race' but everything to do with culture.

I don't know if you want to reconsider your fondness for that line, but it's one we've got used to – usually from people you wouldn't want to be associated with.

And well said Slothrop.
 
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