I discovered Daft Punk shortly after I finished hanging the posters in my freshman year dorm room.
Discovery was the soundtrack to countless late nights at the library, and when I’d keel over with shin splints while running at the gym, Alive 2007 was what was blasting through my iPod Classic’s headphones. As I was getting ready to graduate, they released Random Access Memories, which would turn out to be their final gift.
Dumpweed is still the GOAT album opener for me, but dang, listen to the first 30 seconds of Give Life Back To Music:
Now THAT’S how you start an album.
Those years that I was diving into Daft Punk, life was full of loose ends. I’d make friends in a class, only to never see them the next semester. There was a girl in my hall who I’d always trade smiles with as we walked past each other, but I never dared to talk to her. I fell in love with VCU, then immediately transferred away.
Things were choppy, but Daft Punk, as a rhythmic soundtrack playing in the background the whole time, helped me stitch my life together. I was 18, starry-eyed as could be, and it felt like I was crossing the bridge away from childhood with these two robot friends behind me.
I wouldn’t recognize Bangalter and de Homem-Christo if they walked past me on the street, but for years I was desperate to learn everything I could about them, picking apart everything they ever said or did like a med school cadaver.
Keanu Reeves once described what it’s like to live in the belly of the celebrity industrial complex.
“I’m Mickey Mouse,” he said. “They don’t know who’s inside the suit.”
And he’s right, we don’t really know any of the people we watch, listen to and admire. We think we can get to know them, but we don’t actually know what’s going on in their heads. The surprised devastation I felt when Anthony Bourdain died in 2018 crystallized it for me. We will never know what it’s like to live in someone else’s head for a day. Not our heroes, not our closest loved ones, and certainly not two house musicians whose most known characteristic is privacy.
It’s been a month or so since Daft Punk announced their split in a way only they could, and I’m still finding myself missing them, kind of like those friends I made in ‘09 but haven’t talked to since.
Thomas and Guy-Manuel have talked publicly about why they leaned into the robot personas — a mix of love for sci-fi glam and a way of toeing the line between fiction and reality — but how can I be sure? Is that just a convenient answer to get a reporter to stop talking? Or another layer to a fictional story they’re telling the world?
All I do know is that Daft Punk will always be impossibly cool to me.
I don’t think it’s useful to speculate on who the robots are, why they chose to be so reclusive, or why they decided to split. I’d rather speculate that Thomas and Guy-Manuel are sitting at a chateau in France, toasting to a hell of a run.
I just hope they’re happy and fulfilled. Their music and the memories I have tied to it sure make me feel that way.