Grammys 2014: Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’ Wins Album of the Year

 

The robots have done it! With their Random Access Memories album, Daft Punk have locked down Album of The Year as well as just about every other award under the sun at the 2014 Grammys, and there’s a damn good reason why. I despise disco. Born among the cocaine-comedown afterglow of the world’s fixation with mirrorball dance music, I learned very early on the difference between music made for dilated pupils & grinding jaws and a genuine artistic statement. But what happens when the disco kids have kids of their own, without translating the need for soul?

Watch Daft Punk and Stevie Wonder’s medley of “Get Lucky” and “Freak Out” at the 2014 Grammy Awards!

The result is the modern EDM movement, rich with soulless dub-by-numbers bass-dropping molly pandering. Naturally, true art finds a way, and just as there will always be outliers pushing the envelope of evolution, there’s also the occasional name who will use their place in the nucleus of the EDM lexicon to vault the entire game to a new level. Enter: Daft Punk.

French duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the men beneath those amazing helmets, are godfathers of the today’s electronica, though their diagnosis of the current EDM landscape is one of bemusement. Random Access Memories is the sound of maestros recoiling from the dumb glut of the EDM scene that owes everything to them. Rather than meeting the modern musical equivalent of the Idiocracyworld with cynicism and damnation, however, Bangalter and Homem-Christo simply turn over the stone and celebrate the organic life crawling beneath – with beautiful results. Live instrumentation, exquisite arrangements and magnificent production are centerpieces of evidence that, when you insist on originality with a perfectionist edge, even flirtation with campy disco can hit like a live-wire of thrashing passion. 

Random Access Memories is a musical Rorschach test – it is many things to many people, and its complex variety will keep the conversation going well beyond the Grammy win on Sunday night. But to the genre inspired so largely by the architects of this album, this is an impossibly high new bar, one that has rendered the play-button hand-waver DJs painfully and obviously flaccid. Congtatulations, boys. 

 

Grammys 2014

 

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