Upon listening to Homework, I quickly became convinced that Daft Punk would almost certainly be a D. I did not enjoy it. While listening, I was really trying my darndest to listen to it genuinely, to listen with an open heart and an open mind, to try to be able to hear it the way people who like it hear it. That’s what good listening is, right? That’s what I’m always trying to do. I’m trying to understand it the way it understands itself, instead of just hearing what I hear and ascribing my own understandings onto it.
For Homework in particular, it was so hard to to listen to it well. It felt mind numbing. I found Homework boring and repetitive, there’s no movement. I’ll often complain about something I don’t like and call it “not melodically pleasant”, “not harmonically interesting”, whatever. Here, I feel like it’s not just that it’s not pleasant or not interesting, it’s that it is nothing. It feels like there’s no anything, nothing is happening ever. It’s just a beat, over and over. I don’t know how to be engaged with it. I’m trying, I tried, and maybe I’ll get better at it and be able to come back to it and do better some time in the future, but right now I do not know how to do listen to it well. I just did not enjoy it at all.
It’s fair to say that I did not have high hopes going into Discovery. Yet, I ended up appreciating it quite a bit—more than that, I ended up liking it quite a bit. I started to get more of a feel for it by the end of my first listen, and by my second listen I was just enjoying it. I was still—am still—learning how to listen, but I was learning while enjoying. I don’t think I just liked it because I got better at listening; I do think this album is substantially better than Homework. Qualitatively different. Not even in the “now it has words!” way that I sometimes fall into. I complained that Homework has nothing; Discovery has something! It has the groove, and it has stuff that actually lives in and works with that groove. I can get behind it, I think. There’s still a lot that I have an inclination to call boring or repetitive, but I also suspect that, at this point, for this album, that’s my own failing to understand and properly hear. I’ll get better at it.
Human After All was fine. Definitely closer to Discovery than to Homework, but I still did not like it near as much as Discovery. The TRON soundtrack I did not enjoy. Sometimes with soundtracks I say, “Oh, but maybe it works really well and sounds good in the movie, I didn’t watch the movie, can’t comment on that!” I have seen this movie. I didn’t like the movie; I didn’t much care about the soundtrack in the movie. It being a bad movie doesn’t help, but what can ya do.
Random Access Memory feels similar to Discovery only arranged way more pop-heavy. You’d think that would make me like it more; I couldn’t handle the “nothing” of Homework, and once we got a little bit more elements typical to pop showing up in Discovery I started to enjoy it way more. Unfortunately, I think for me becoming more pop-like might have hurt RAM a little bit.
Once something starts to sound enough to me like a pop song, I start to get stricter with how I judge it. I know how pop songs go, I know what I want them to sound like. I have so much experience listening to pop songs; the more you enter into that space, the more aware I am of what rules are in play. I am far more forgiving when you exit the space entirely. The 8 minute “Touch”? It’s got some spots in it that I think sell me on it, I can respect it, I can see that it’s doing something other than “pop song” and it’s doing that thing well. The 6 minute “Get Lucky”? That is just a pop song, and it should’ve been 3 minutes. 2 and a half, even. I think Discovery is better because it stays in its lane more, I guess. But RAM is still pretty obviously good, still very well done. I’ll probably come to like them and appreciate them more given time, I can recognize that they’re both very well crafted and all that yada yada blah blah blah.
For now, I think I’m gonna give a C+ after all. I think it probably deserves higher; I think if I come back and listen to it all again a year from now I probably will give it higher. Right now, though, there’s too much that I… not that I don’t like, but that takes me so much effort to like. So until it gets easier, it’ll be a C+
Daft Punk complete, now listening to: Dysmn
tunafruitsandwitch 