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Random Access Criticism: The Internet Pundits Are Ruining Daft Punk, Music

Hours after a highly-anticipated album gets leaked online, what can possibly be said about it?

Hours after a highly-anticipated album gets leaked online, what can possibly be said about it?

Not long after the stream for Daft Punk's Random Access Memories went live on Monday (following a leak on BitTorrent), a DJ tweeted his review, a widely-retweeted sentiment that would be echoed in some form or another, in quips across the web.

Listening to RAM obv. The first track is pish.

— JACKMASTER (@jackmaster) May 13, 2013

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Sorry I take that back. 90% of the album is pish. Never thought in a million years that Get Lucky would be the best track on there.

— JACKMASTER (@jackmaster) May 13, 2013

This wasn’t going to sit well with Daft Punk’s fans. But even indifferent listeners had reason for skepticism. At Pigeons and Planes, someone wrote an article called, “Why It's Too Early to Judge Daft Punk's New Album”:

The new Daft Punk album is here. It has arrived. Sit with it for a minute. Let it sink in. Play it at your next party. Let it spin at 3 a.m. when you’re high/drunk/sober/happy/ alone/with friends/depressed/whatever. Give it a little time. Let this album live. Music isn’t a science—it breathes and moves, it adjusts to its surroundings. We know that everyone wants to figure this out as quickly as possible, but that’s not the way to take in music, and an album release like this one just shows more clearly than ever how unhealthy the state of music really is. We are literally trying to review albums—no, album leaks—within 24 hours. When it’s something with as much history, anticipation, and relevance as the new Daft Punk project, is that really how we want to handle it?

What I know after listening to the new record for a couple of days: critics—and especially critics on social media, offering their first quick impressions—really don't know what the hell they're talking about when they talk about Random Access Memories.

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This time, however, it's not because Daft Punk supposedly failed to live up to Homework and Discovery (depending on one's preference between the two). Instead, I'm going to blame the internet. It's turned into a disintegrating force in music. Piracy really isn't at fault; jackasses with opinions and platforms and itchy Twitter fingers are. And when would-be critics race to opine about a new song, video or album, whether it's through established music outlets, blogs, Facebook, or YouTube, they do a disservice to the audience.

Everything is about velocity. The internet has virtually zero patience for thoughtful, reasoned critique. It can't wait. Much of this, obviously, has to do with the money imperative behind site traffic. The hits are the commodity that pays for the entire operation. Except in rare circumstances, the later one publishes a review of any given album, the less chance there is of social interaction. In other words, your shit won't sell if the post doesn't go live that day, and more usually, that hour. The new operating principle is this: to sell its shit, the Internet pumps out shit. So it goes.

There is, as one friend noted, very little interest in letting Random Access Memories live as a record and as an experience, whatever that may be. But any serious music fan knows that, like a good wine, like good fine art, like an idea, music needs to breathe. It has to have an atmosphere in which it can fully bloom, be tasted, and be discussed. For all the good technology has brought to the music listener, it has an unparalleled capability of burying good music (or hyping bad music) in a micro-second. It only takes one critic's impression to trigger a meme, a hive opinion, and so unmake the critical experience of a record for thousands of people. Think of it like the spread of a rumor, an information virus, the sort that can destabilize markets in seconds with false data, except with brains and musical taste. Disposable media begets disposable content.

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Granted, this phenomenon isn't new. It's a problem with criticism in general in an era of countless distractions. Hysteria or hyperbole is an excellent way to attract attention. But online, that kind of criticism gets taken to the nth degree.

Consider My Bloody Valentine's latest album, m b v. No one could possibly have spent the time required to pick up on every nuance, every shade and morsel of white noise and beautiful dissonance. And, yet, YouTube and Google searches were quickly polluted with reactionary opinions. The commenters may have been trolls; but they were also critics, turned by their sheer reach into arbiters of mass taste.

I almost fell victim to this hyper-criticism myself with m b v. After the sublime notes of “You Found Now” faded, my excitement dissipated with each successive track. Even so, I fell asleep with headphones on listening to the album. Days later, after I'd digested the album at full volume on my living room speakers, I sat down to write my review of m b v.

The Quietus, which typically balances solid criticism with more sensationalist or provocative editorials, took a slightly different tack. On May 1, writer Paul Smith reviewed Random Access Memories track-by-track. But he didn't jump to conclusions: “Random Access Memories is a gut-busting 75 minutes long. While too ambitious to evaluate after one listen, it’s a record that constantly surprises.”

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Lauren Martin of FACT was much more succinct with the tweet: “Maybe lots of people are hating on RAM right now because it’s not very good … It’s not great or even god awful. Just, pish.” Again, this is a mere day after the stream was launched. Martin's opinion may ultimately represent a general consensus that RAM is middling, but it is still a rush to judgment. Something is very amiss in the world when Daft Punk is relegated to "pish," while unabashed praise is heaped on the overhyped Charlie XCX, who is, according to Martin, a “young pop star to be reckoned with." The hype is something to be reckoned with, but Charlie XCX's music could never be mistaken for earth-shattering.

Diplo's Twitter review isn’t even worth quoting. But one should read his tweets if only to understand that even famed producers can and do talk out of their asses, especially on Twitter.

Insta-critics, hyper-critics, or whatever they should be called, might write off any positive criticism of Random Access Memories as a byproduct of too much investment in Daft Punk. That may be fair, but passing a hastily definitive judgment two or three days after Daft Punk made the stream available is not. The dominance of this insta-criticism raises a serious question: is Daft Punk's album stream to blame here (to say nothing of its marketing strategy)? Or is that the internet is just not the right medium for serious, thoughtful music reviews, or criticism in general, for that matter?

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The internet is how most of us experience music these days. But with the good, comes the bad. We can tour an entire genre in the space of an hour. But our demand for new music from the bands we love can turn an album leak viral in minutes. Post-leak, Daft Punk tried to soak up listeners with their own full album stream; but their giant squid-like promotion machine also set them up for fast, reactionary criticism.

Given its wildly successful viral marketing campaign, it's fair to say that even grandmothers and rubes have probably seen traces of the hype surrounding Daft Punk's new album Random Access Memories. It's understandable. Daft Punk have, over the years (and despite claims that the masks focused attention on the music) carefully and masterfully crafted a unique cult of personality for more than just the club kids. Kraftwerk is an obvious parallel, but perhaps Daft Punk borrowed more heavily from Space, a French electronic group whose members dressed in astronaut suits way back in the late '70s. Kiss is another analogue, albeit a creatively groan-worthy one.

The disguises, in fact, were an interesting postmodern touch, a meta-commentary on the alienation of digital music. When they managed to penetrate the mainstream in the early '90s, DJs and electronic music producers were largely faceless. The robot helmets, preceded by more primitive attempts (face paint, for instance, or paper masks), looked like an attempt to take the faceless, robotic DJ to its absurd conclusion. Around the same time, Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Orbital, Underworld, and several other acts were putting a "face" on electronic music. Daft Punk's move was an odd one by comparison, but it certainly worked as a marketing tactic.

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Daft Punk, circa 1996

With Random Access Memories, the mask motif and the whole Daft Punk brand reaches its absolute apex. Where else do Bangalter and Homem-Christo go from here? If the Alive tour was the height of Daft Punk in live format, Electroma their cinematic opus, and TRON: Legacy the duo's debut as film composers; then the whole Random Access Memories experience feels like the synthesis of the total Daft Punk mythos, an album three years in the making, with an impressive list of collaborators, a limited use of electronics, and a sound caught between visions of the future and nostalgia for the disco.

For years they've celebrated their robot alter egos and electronic music production, even though the music has always had a distinctive human element. They didn't just offer circuitry, but a complete nervous system—a full range of emotional response. Discovery was incredibly organic, while Human After All morphed into something less mechanistic and more elastic on the Alive tour. It was sublime vindication— especially for those who initially dug Human After All—when Daft Punk silenced the critics from atop their laser-lined psychedelic pyramid.

Now, seven years later, the insta-criticism seems unavoidable. One way or another RAM was going to make its way onto the internet, and be experienced in a less-than-ideal way. Perhaps they could have anticipated this, and preempted it. Given all of Daft Punk's talk about analog recording, vintage synthesizers, and going back to the past to find the future, did they think that perhaps the proper listening experience, like their apparently meticulous recording process, was best enjoyed slowly and in high-fidelity, in a way that mp3 files on computer speakers simply don’t allow? Did they ever consider releasing only an actual, touch-able record?

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Daft Punk is, if anything, not daft. Surely they must have considered that their retro approach on Random Access Memories would meet head-on the kaleidoscopic ADHD, Tumblred version of the internet in which we all, for better or for worse, now live. If Daft Punk really wanted to be bold, they should have made Random Access Memories a vinyl-only release. It would have forced a degree of patience on both their fans and all curious individuals that we don't see much anymore.

And what is more, it might have helped to silence and save us all from all that traffic-baiting criticism. Including, even, my particular bit of it.

Read more DJ and Daft Punk

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GIF courtesy Pitchfork