For the second half of September, I’m putting my Mental Jukebox into a time machine, featuring the best songs on the best albums from the very best years of music. #70sThrough90sBestAlbum
In 1997, there was a New York City club called Au Bar that my crew frequented quite a bit. When I say “frequented”, I mean going Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night within one week wasn’t exactly unheard of. We were young. We wanted action. And we devoured up all the music. Daft Punk played a big, big part of that. The debut album introduced us to French house, a genre that most of us didn’t know even existed. It was the soundtrack for our nights for the next couple of years until we all settled down and got girlfriends. One of those tracks was “Da Funk”.
Simple synth hooks. Driving, bass-heavy beats. Electromagnetic treble chords. And not much else. The beauty of “Da Funk” is that it wasn’t overly complex. This minimalist approach had a way of making you feel it so viscerally. And what is music’s job to do than allow you to feel it and experience it. Back at Au Bar, that’s all it was to us. And “Da Funk”, “Around the World”, “One More Time” and countless other Daft Punk tracks served their purpose. But what we didn’t realize was how pioneering the French duo was at the time, and how influential they would become.