A Guide to Daft Punk

This guide highlights the origins of the group and points at some of the music they’ve made along the way.

The marketing strategy for this album, which has celebrated the contributions of disco pioneers like Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder, is one of the most exciting things about the album’s release. It is the culmination of efforts by many fans, artists, and dance music historians to make up for America’s long sordid history with dance music. Finally, artists who quietly pioneered major changes in music history are getting credit for their contributions on the popular stage.

This isn’t a complete history of Daft Punk, nor is it an attempt to talk about Daft Punk in the 2000s. The group’s innovations in the 2000s have been covered widely, as have their forefathers in disco—the style that figures heavily in Daft Punk’s musical DNA. Instead, this guide highlights the origins of the group, and points to some of the music they’ve made along the way that their more recent fans might not be familiar with.

Daft Punk aren't just some retro-disco group; although their recent publicity might suggest otherwise, they haven't ever really been about "taking it back." Originally, the group was jumping on board with a wave of new music that had originated in black and Latino communities in America and was spreading worldwide. Despite their influences in disco, and in spite of their debts to house pioneers we discuss here, Daft Punk have always been about forward motion, whatever the tone of the group's recent marketing campaign.

Written by David Drake (@somanyshrimp)

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With the hype for Daft Punk's upcoming album Random Access Memories reaching a peak, this is an exciting moment for anyone who ever felt like disco received short shrift in the late 1970s, when disco allegedly died.

Disco' received a symbolic "death" most publicly during the July 1979 “Disco Demolition Night” in Chicago. For years, disco was maligned as overly commercial, bourgeois, cheesy, and monotonous. Punk rock was celebrated by critics and writers, while disco was seen as commercial and conformist.

Of course, many of these things were true of disco—but that was part of what made disco great. Even fans would admit, some songs were monotonous (although those songs were seldom very popular; disco was very democratic). But part of its bourgie background was about aspiration. Disco was music created by and for segregated gay, black, and Latino dancefloors in New York; much as in hip-hop, it was about signalling new wealth, in addition to being shaped by racial segregation and an emerging gay liberation movement.

Most disco-haters might not have realized it, but at the time, their objections to disco were objections to some of the most visible aspects of these marginalized subcultures. Rock music was respectable, critically acclaimed, for “serious” music fans. Meanwhile, the music that came from gay urban dance floors was seen as ephemeral, feminine, and un-serious.

This is why the high profile promotion for Random Access Memories is so exciting; the gradual ascent to canonization of the original disco and dance artists has taken a long time.

Groups like LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture made it "cool" a decade ago, opening hipsters up to the four-on-the-floor groove. At that time, Daft Punk got mildly positive reviews from publications inside the United States, even as they flourished abroad. With the success of EDM in the past few years, dance music has completely crossed over; no one looks askance at house music’s marketplace triumph.

Daft Punk, however, are mainstreaming awareness of classic disco innovators, putting the accomplishments of greats, like Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder, on a pedestal to sit alongside classic rock heroes like Bob Dylan and The Beatles. It’s hard to be cynical about that.

But Daft Punk didn't just hear disco and make their music out of its remains. For those fans in the United States who got on board with the duo’s classic album Discovery (or later), there’s a missing puzzle piece—or four.

What happened between disco and Daft Punk?

Chicago House was forged in the ashes of disco. Frankie Knuckles was a disco DJ in New York City when he was offered a chance to spin for crowds in Chicago. He ended up at Chicago’s Warehouse, playing disco and the popular dance music of the time to often black and gay crowds.

Soon, homegrown Chicago producers started experimenting with drum machines and production equipment that had become more affordable. The music they made was less expensive to record than disco, which often required bankrolling full orchestras for the lush string sections, or at the very least, paying entire bands. The market behind disco soon fell apart—people weren’t paying musicians to tour, they were paying DJs to play records, after all. Making beats was the economical future.

While hip-hop exploded nationally in the mid-1980s with Run-DMC and The Beastie Boys, house music was flourishing in Chicago. House got its name when Frankie Knuckles started playing these new, drum machine-centric dance songs; as they became more and more popular, people would go to the record stores and request “house” records—records played during Knuckles’ sets at the “Warehouse.”

New sounds evolved within the scene; acid house, for example, featured a strange, distorted-wormhole sonic texture that came from the Roland 909 drum machine. Many house songs, though, were simply disco tracks made on less expensive equipment, with all of the lush gospel and soul influences transposed to a harsher, more modern-sounding template. Think Farley "Jackmaster" Funk and Darryl Pandy's cover of Isaac Hayes' "I Can't Turn Around."

Eventually, this music crossed over in a major way, becoming the sonic template for dance pop of the late 1980s on, for example, records by Madonna. Gay, black, and Latino club culture had permeated pop music yet again, as disco by another name.

When hip-hop finally really hit Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s, house was still dominant, but the audience became divided. Then came house’s second wave of DJs and producers—many of whom would be mentioned on Daft Punk’s “Teachers” as major influences on the group's sound. ("Teachers" was a track on the group's first album that listed many of the group's influences, everyone from Dr. Dre to Detroit techno artists like Jeff Mills and Chicago pioneers like Green Velvet.)

The sound of Chicago's new school was hard-edged, but cut through with disco samples and influences. The songs were released on labels like Radikal Fear and Cajual. And they were picked up by a burgeoning rave culture in Europe.

Before they heard Chicago’s 2nd wave, Daft Punk were in a rock band in France called Darlin’ (“Six months, four songs, two gigs, and that was it,” Bangalter once told Mixmag). After the group broke up—one member of Darlin’ went on to form the pop-rock group Pheonix—Bangalter and Homem-Christo began experimenting with synthesizers.

The group’s first real track was an aggressive, uptempo house track called “The New Wave” (eventually retitled and rerecorded as “Alive”) for their debut album, Homework. When Homework came out in 1997, it was full of house music—long, extended four-on-the-floor tracks ideal for DJing, and very close in style to what was going on in Chicago

This transition from rock to house music didn’t come out of nowhere; at this point, Daft Punk were more working with a formula established in Chicago than they were pioneering—even if they did happen to create some of house music’s very best songs along the way. They did it with outside ears.

The idea of “filtering” old disco tracks and wedding them to a four-on-the-floor house beat was already pervasive in Chicago at this time; just listen to this mix by Chicago DJ CZR, which came out the same year as Homework and is similarly packed with disco-filtering house jams, alongside aggressive, uptempo "jacking" house music. You’ll see a few familiar names on the tracklist: Paul Johnson and DJ Funk, for example, are both mentioned at the very beginning of “Teachers.”

Filter-disco house music—whether by Chicago house artists like Paul Johnson, or French ones like Daft Punk—worked a very particular magic on the listener.

The hardcore four-on-the-floor beat of Chicago acid house was a shock to the system, the antithesis, in some ways, of the lush, expensive sounds of disco from which it derived. In Chicago at the time, you were as likely to hear gangbangers blasting acid house in their cars as you were to hear the stereotypical raver doing the same. It was hardcore music, much like hip-hop, and it was popular with diverse audiences throughout the city.

House was about abrasive, hammering repetition, designed to replicate physicality and sexuality. Some of these tracks were a radical break from the smoothly sensual, the spiritual, the soulful traditions of generations past.

Filter-house was a play on that split, because it built on the one thing acid house and disco had in common: the four-on-the-floor groove. Essentially, a house producer would take a known disco record and sample it. They would then distort the EQ settings, bringing down the treble, or the bass, toying with how you heard the record. It was a way to play with tensions, to tease. It was about build and release, but in a much more impactful way than could be accomplished with traditional songwriting. This was something DJs already did with disco records when spinning live; essentially, house producers adapted the DJ's tools to make records, and a new sound was born.

The trick is kind of like an approximation of sex, much in the way dancing can be. The producer might build tension by looping one part of a disco sample—say, Teddy Pendergrass’ “You Can’t Hide From Yourself.” He might kill the treble, so it suddenly sounds as if the listener (or dancer) has suddenly been submerged underwater. He might cut out the kick drum, so everyone is suddenly floating, untethered from the groove. And, just as pressure is building, he might bring everything up together at once, just as the sweetest part of the sample hits, for a full release of energy.

In fact, that’s just what DJ Sneak (again, see “Teachers”) did on “You Can’t Hide From Your Bud,” a Chicago house classic that filtered the old school and made it sound new.

Listen to Daft Punk's song "Musique." Now listen to Dan Hartman’s “Instant Replay.” You can easily hear them working along similar lines.

The group had other influences as well. By the late 1980s, the East coast—particularly New Jersey and New York—had evolved thriving dance scenes as well. It was often called “garage,” because it descended from the constellation of styles pioneered on the dancefloor of New York's Paradise Garage, much as “house” came from the Warehouse. Todd Edwards was one New Jersey garage producer who became influential on Daft Punk. His style involved chopping up small bits of samples and sound and recombining them. It would sound as if you were listening to house music heard through spinning fan blades. Daft Punk would later collaborate with him on “Face to Face,” from Discovery.

There were others, too, who likely impacted the duo's sound, both within Chicago (Green Velvet, who originally recorded “The Peroclator") and outside: Jeff Mills was a Detroit techno artist, Dr. Dre, is, of course, Dr. Dre, and Kenny Dope and Louie Vega were from Brooklyn. (Want another example of filter-house that pre-dates Daft Punk? You may have heard The Bucketheads hit song “The Bomb!,” produced by Kenny Dope. It sampled Chicago's "Street Player." We think Pitbull probably liked this song too.)

Almost immediately as their careers began, Daft Punk were more than just a group. In 1995, Thomas Bangalter founded Roulé records, and started putting out music under his own name (1995’s “Trax On Da Rocks”), for fellow French artists (Alan Braxe), and for American artists working in a similar vein.

One such song was “Hold On” by American singer and producer Romanthony; its uplifting, gospel-influenced vocal style is considerably more in the American house music tradition than the French one. (It is also a track liable to leave tears on the dancefloor.) Romanthony would go on to collaborate with Daft Punk directly; those are his vocals on their hit “One More Time,” from Discovery.

Then there was "So Much Love to Give," a collaboration between Bangalter and DJ Falcon. The song pushed the boundaries of possibility: It was a snippet from The Real Thing's "Love's Such a Wonderful Thing," extended out to nearly 11 minutes. It was like an experiment: how much repetition could a listener or dancer take? Bangalter and Falcon seemed to theorize that, given the right injection of euphoria, the answer was, "a lot."

But perhaps the biggest track on Roulé was partly Bangalter’s own, released with the band Stardust. “Music Sounds Better With You” became a major international smash, blanketing dancefloors across the world for the next several years after its 1997 release. It sampled Chaka Khan’s “Fate,” but in its euphoric optimism and the vocal performance by singer Benjamin Diamond, the song was like a European interpretation of an American style.

It was also helped propel an even wider fascination with filter-house in Europe and throughout the world. Artists like Pete Heller, Modjo, and We in Music helped spearhead a movement that popularized house music on the other side of the ocean, while hip-hop was busying itself on stateside dancefloors.

House in the late 1990s wasn’t just Daft Punk; they were one of its more well-known quantities, and likely released two of the movement’s best full albums in Discovery and Homework. But amazing house music was still being made across the world, from Chicago, to records released on New York labels like Strictly Rhythm, to labels helmed by Daft Punk themselves, like Bangalter’s own.

Or like Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo’s Crydamoure. Crydamoure had a flurry of dance records in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the best of which were compiled on two excellent compilations called Waves and Waves II.

These records are secret stashes for Daft Punk fans looking for more in the vein of late-’90s filter-house, as well as plenty of tracks that deviate from this sound. Guy-Man pushed records by Chicagoans like Paul Johnson, as well as Guy-Man psuedonyms like Le Knight Club.

A few highlights: “The Wrath of Zeus,” released by The Eternals, is a hilarious track in which a French-accented Zeus arrives on disco string lightning bolts to declare that all dancers will be confined to a “never-ending dance on this floor,” laughs maniacally, and then kicks into a compulsive dance groove that samples disco group Lipps, Inc.

Another track, “Wet Indiez” by Deelat, features an oddball bouncing house beat, with a strange man yelling bizarre dance instructions on top (“ohhh! Shaaaake it! You. Get. Wet. Now!”). Or Archigram’s “Doggystyle,” which, instead of filtering disco music, filtered The Stooges’ BDSM rock anthem, “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

Discovery is a great moment in music history, because Daft Punk traded one kind of innovation for another.

In the mid-1990s, the group wasn't really bringing back disco. Instead, the group jumped directly into the active dance music fray, competing with the new wave of house music coming out of Chicago and New York City. They weren't trying to be retro any more than any of the producers in Chicago or New York or New Jersey were. It's also likely that they (and many of their peers in France) wanted to make dance music that was contemporary, perhaps informed by history, but breaking from it at the same time.

On Discovery, there was a bit of a retrenchment. Gone was the radical break with traditional songwriting that house music had made. They were composing, like "real" songwriters. But strangely, they managed to make this seem like progressive move, rather than a regressive one. Because at that point, house music had developed its own orthodoxy, its own boxes and rules. And they weren't interested in being held back by them, either.

In came the unexpected guitar solos, the short song forms, the influence of the sci-fi mythos. But they held onto some elements, too: the androgynized vocals, the obsession with repetition.

This piece is not intended to suggest that Daft Punk weren't original, or that they're being celebrated more than they deserve. Many of their peers, both in the United States and in France, do deserve more attention for their contributions to music history. But hopefully, highlighting those accomplishments only draws more attention to what Daft Punk did so well and so uniquely.