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The Digital Divide
Daft Punk Abducts Los Angeles
By Nick Andrews

On a cloudy Saturday afternoon, Los Angeles resembled the premiere chapter of Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” where wandering circus freaks roam the streets of a small town, warning of storms that are coming, selling lightening rods and promising something memorable and disastrous. Something that will inevitably change your life forever. That Saturday night, two robots landed in the city, set up shop and showed California their unforgettable electronic insanity. Not since last year’s Coachella performance (and ten years before that) had California been rocked by Daft Punk, and they expected them to be nothing less than legendary.

The fifty dollar ticket price included Kavinsky and Sebastian, two French electro house DJ’s from the increasingly popular Ed Banger Records. Their set was another slice of the future for house music across the world, one dominated by a static electro vibe that has spread from Paris like the plague. America’s own Ratatat also dropped into the tour lineup for the night. But with Daft Punk’s name headlining, as well as fervor from their last legendary performance on the West Coast, Californians weren’t going to miss this one. July 21st was another sold out night on the exclusive Daft Punk Alive tour, hitting only a handful of cities in the United States.

When lights died, atop a giant glowing pyramid, two robots introduced themselves with “The Close Encounter of the Third Kind” theme. Fading into “Robot Rock,” they built up the tempo and once dropped- it was all over: every collective shred of inhibition or reservation vanished and the audience exploded in a visual and auditory firestorm. The show was an assault from all angles.

What sets Daft Punk apart from any other electronic music act, or any other music act, could never be singled down any one or two key factors. What is so impressive about their set is how well thought out and executed it is. Fans should expect to be totally overwhelmed with over five layers of lighting, every color from every angle, two massive flatscreens on each side of the stage broadcasting live feed, a video screen for a backdrop and an incredibly large lcd screen-plated pyramid. There aren’t many sets in the world that can compete for stage presence. This is their set, Daft Punk tours everywhere with it and charges an incredible fee to set it up. They’ve got this down to a science. After the show, I heard someone say “I feel like I have to sit in a corner and stare at the wall to even begin to digest everything that happened in the last hour and a half.”

Cycling through their performance, it becomes clear that none of their songs were meant to be played individually. Every hit that was intermixed with another, building up themes, cascading down and resetting with impeccable execution. The apex of the concert was “Around the World”, where a series of rainbow lights connected around the audience, leaving thousands of people roaring in delight, literally in the air screaming and jumping. Or maybe it was “Television Rules the Nation”, where the lighting triangulated over and over again as the music hammered the crowd into the ground.

Or it was the finale and it’s riveting, picturesque tidal wave of text- where the word “Human” stretched across the stage rivaled only by the pyramid, generating videos of bone structures, skin and muscle tissues, even eyes. The fragile essence of mankind. The word “Together” flashed instantaneously afterwards, addressing the divisive nature of technology. A simultaneous possibility of unity. Or then again, it was the entire performance that left Californians in a collective state of shock for hours on end after leaving the arena. The expressions on these people’s faces were priceless- it looked like they’d been abducted. One thing that is crucial for an amazing experience is crowd vibe, and these people were loving this.

Nobody has addressed the digital revolution like Daft Punk. The same feelings of regret and insecurity, the same capacity for a profound beauty and unforgiving tragedy generated by this machinery. These same themes ring as true today as they did in the nineties when first mastered. “Television Rules the Nation”, “Technologic”, and “Human After All” offer themselves as epic monuments of technological progress not only in regards to their production, but also within their messages accenting the rise of the computer age. We’re entering a cold new world here, and they awaken these fears and address them very thoroughly in as few words as necessary. When the spectacle finally came to a close and the lights kicked back on, you could hear the collective groan of thousands of people dying for it to resume once again. For the journey to continue. And in the end, it might seem strange to think that two robots could capture what it is to be human so acutely, but then again- no matter how unbelievable it might be- they are human after all.