Random Elevator Memories, Random Access Floors (or as the song lyrics suggest, Bluebeard-esque rooms)

Random Access Memories

by Daft Punk

Going Up? Watch your head.
The Daft Punk stage specially commission by Sony for

 2013 Wee Waa Festival, Australia, the

live uncovering of the top secret album

Random Access Memories

Knowing that so many people shop online now, Daft Punk have decided to bring some of the most bland (and badly performed) elevator style music to your own home now. So you can shop whilst sitting right at your computer and hear digital, digital-age elevator music without even the dizziness or sense of hemmed-in claustrophobia coming from being in a 4 square meter space without windows. Unfortunately, though, that might come anyway without the movement up and down stories, just from this nauseating music.

One might guess that the music was also conceived in a 4 square meter space without windows and those strange beings who dress up as robots did research over a year or so in going up and down, whilst writing the music there also, eventually.

It's awful.

Random is right. That's what you're given by the people whom, once, you could be fairly sure to trust about every segment seeming to be very well chosen by very aware, intelligent, sympathetic, understanding, hard working music producers. Daft Punk never seemed to be the kind of musicians who might be able, for example, to produce a stage or film soundtrack on directions by producers for "5 minutes here", "12 minutes there", "20 minutes there". They had a wise knack of knowing short pieces of music based around short hooks. It's some achievement to be able to make or choose those very hooks and develop a short, concise, apt track around them.

This album, whatever you make of it musically, is NOT by any means Electronic Dance Music or, usually much to do with EDM, or if you like the spectrum of 80s and later house club music, with the odd exception such as parts of (yes, parts of, because everything is a shocking, confounding mess) "Gorgio by Moroder".

I'm not whatsoever reacting particularly to the duo's decision to make music outside of their old EDM, house - club electronic frame of production. Like many others, I'm all for diversity and for being adventurous. I'd agree totally with the spirit that says sticking in the same, weathered club house electronica frame would probably be much worse than doing something new or adventurous. However, it seems that the duo have lost their creative talent, their know-how, whatever the genre.

I read recently that they'd tried to make some new club electronica for an album a few years ago, but even they concluded the stuff stank, and it was withdrawn, binned, never published. So, they decided instead to try to learn how to be jazz and psychedelic pop-rock musicians.

  

Tron soundtrack days (2010 / 11)

They don't have a clue, unless that is the point, in keeping with some of the duo's old expressive, conceptual art concepts. These may be seen as "Illuminati style unseen controllers ruin musicians all over the world" and "So, the robots or controlled puppets are unable to manifest as normal humans and make some good, real, living music." And if it is the point to not have a clue, it only means that they really, really don't have a clue about making this kind of music for such a focus is worse than it coming "naturally". And it sounds it. It really does. It sounds so conceited and framed, staged and effected.

OK, these guys aren't stupid it seems, from past evidence. Now they've set out to make a modern jazz - fusion record which would normally be in the smooth soul kind of area, but they throw in vocoders like you'd throw a banging bin-lid into, say, the nicer Spanish style styles of Maurice Ravel, or someone like Miles Davis. Even the machine like vocoder voices sound as if they're doing it against their will, only because they've been made to. That's a very specific thing to do, but the duo seem not to be able to show respect to the meaning and worth of that genre alone, strangely going down serious psychedelic rock and avant-garde 70s pop-rock music-theatre alleyways at the same time. Who would think of mixing up these musical worlds? More than that, they believe it's time to add an old 50s to modern day West Coast USA flavour of music to the already very odd cauldron.

 From the RAMs album live premiere in Australia, 2013

I can't accept that Daft Punk aren't completely aware of that the music clearly sounds framed, staged, conceited, effected, unnatural, highly ridiculous. I think they may have done this deliberately, such is the quite extremist strangeness of their conceptual performance art idea (which is something unrelated to pure musicianship art), and the fetishist strangeness of this album. It's a completely different kind of art. That the music is not good is what is aimed at. Their GQ exclusive interview (still available in the Web) shows the duo tending to try to make clear that novel direness may be exactly the point. They thought people would think "it sucks", and while they think it's genuinely, honestly bad to stay in the same creative style rut, they decided to make record which kind of "sucks".

I can't help feeling that this is Daft Punk's attempt to bow out of the spotlight, to go down, perhaps in a huge flash of light. There had to be a perhaps there, for they say they could not predict the reaction to the album. They've said they expected the opposite. I kind of feel sorry for them that so few people have taken their production as what I believe they meant it to be, and so many have taken the awful music at face value, but thinking it is good. I fully respect the duo's right to make any kind of sounds they wish to. I think this is a rebellion statement, against numerous things perhaps, and I believe that the group, of course, know better than anyone that the music of this album, taken as music alone and without further meaning, is nothing to be proud of.

(Except, that is, perhaps, in just expressing feelings such as in therapeutic music creative sessions - which I think is very important for anyone to be able to do, also to the general public if desired. But need it be something to set the duo up financially for the next 10 or so high-spending years? The film they decided to release in very limited editions is great, Electroma. I love it, it's a landmark piece of cinema, and it ought to be able to be seen without feeling one is sneaking cursory, seemingly under-the-table glances in a low resolution Youtube upload version. This album, though, is one they ought to have kept for a release numbered in very low thousands. I feel strongly about this because it's like we're being told, being force-fed, strongly, that "this is modern culture", and even, "it's good". That's the kind of thing that both the media and the modern user-created media communications reality does.)

The last big question - flavour of the decade in these conspiracy theory obsessed times, Daft Punk's own long-term obsession also - is, is this some kind of rather purposefully bad, tongue-in-cheek album merely because of their long term Illuminati style control in music art theme alone? The question is, are the themes and purposes which I find to be behind RAMs purely to be taken as art (Interstellar 5555, Electroma, Human After All etc.)? Or is there really someone behind them making them act like puppets against their wills, as the stories were to suggest for musicians generally?

I'm struck by the staged, absolutely still characters in the Capricorn One evoking Mars video set to Get Lucky who suddenly move on cue near the end, as if the unseen fat controller had just clicked his fingers, or raised their puppet strings. It leads to wondering, of course, and considering they're making so much money out of this, of is, were / are the guys in the control of musicians gang after all? These people make their music on tour right in the middle of a big Illuminati style symbolic pyramid. What's the point? What are they doing? Are they perhaps saying they're put there, unable to choose. Or are they making the statement, hell, look, we just go a little further in our diversions than the other bands who know the handshakes and symbols to get the money and suppress the real creativity out there?

Does the Get Lucky clip with frozen then suddenly moving figures seem like a Mars set?

 Mars in a warehouse studio, Capricorn One (1978)

Anyway, I think, perhaps it's not so much worth dwelling on when the music alone is that poor. If it were a good album that managed to express similar things, to ask the same questions by a different means, everything would be different. It's a big thing to make inferior music to go into other peoples' sensitive ears kind of on purpose, perhaps behind the cloak of serious art. Still, I'll always feel at least a bit sorry for them that they've somehow felt they had to make this particular album (or maybe, any album at all, anything), and yet, the people can't see it for what it is. Sympathy might be due where the duo discover that most of the fans will love and take as without subtext anything with a sheen, high quality studio recording values (not the Daft Punk original values at all, this) rather than musical values, and a hip marketing crusade.

While I know most people will only consider this album as on face value, and will think it is good music (it's not), I suppose there are people who will buy the album for the social significance, the event-like nature of it, the conceptual art identity I've been trying to describe. However, at the end of the day, to me, it's torture, it really is. I've rarely been so annoyed and pecked at and hurt by a piece of music, it feels like a quite sadistic thing. If Daft Punk really are making the conceptual art statements I've suggested here, by in a deadpan fashion making very inferior music, they'd really need to have guns held at their backs by those Illuminati style controllers (in the mould of Dmitri Shostakovich) for me to appreciate this as expressive performance art. While I don't wish that on anyone, of course, I wouldn't bother with the art concept in itself, otherwise. Give my ears and brain a break, please, I'd say. 

 Sasha Frere-Jones, New Yorker magazine, notes the robot mask allusion to art of Jackson's Thriller    

A perspective on Bowie: 'The phenomenon'

The V and A Musuem, London, which calls itself "the world's greatest museum of design and art" opened the David Bowie is exhibition a few days ago this March. It runs until 11 August 2013. The museum curators were given unprecedented access to Bowie's personal artefact archive. There is a lot of stuff in there from a Ziggy Stardust suit (etcetera) to attention grabbing multimedia including nine foot video walls, to original lyrics hand scrawled on note paper by Mr Bowie.

I was alerted to the exhibition by BBC's The Review Show (22 March 2013), and I heard the exhibition described as a collage rather than a chronological exhibition, and a very diverse journey. As you might expect for a discussion by critics who are really, mostly long term deep David Bowie fans, there was only a  little mention of the exhibition itself before they got lost into going on about the man himself and the past and the present. Evidently the exhibition inspires this.

I've often seen this perspective of David Bowie, not the full picture I know. For it is partly cynical and partly can't fully appreciate part of the core essence of what he did, but in ways it is also a full picture from a wider human sphere (that can't be fully or as drily defined or summed up, of course), as even intended. Even though it is a partly cynical perspective, it still was intended, is still inextricable from Bowie, I feel, and is a substantial part of the inherent truth of the essence of David Bowie as the man in his public work.

Here it is. Bowie is a definite cultural phenomenon and that is no accident. It is a deep phenomenon which this musician is. The phenomenon in large part involves the essence of the postmodern practise of receptionism (seldom used term, but central to some elements of postmodernism in culture).

What is this? What a thing is is substantially about the effect it is intended to have, or can have anyway where the effect is not so planned particularly. A thing is substantially about how it is received. With Bowie this is a cultural phenomenon that is to be, which is to be about being, a cultural phenomenon. "Spiders from Mars" sung to those notes told me this a long time ago. But this is more than just a cultural phenomenon that is about being a cultural phenomenon - it is the erection of a personality cult intentionally to be worshipped as a personality cult. As said in the BBC program, Bowie "permeates our culture" and "seems to be all round us". Even when he hasn't been active much, he is always very notably there somehow, or the notable absence of something large may register. I'm not saying this is the whole story, of course.

Of course, David Bowie himself might voice disagreement, saying he just is and performs. But I know he'd be lying really, of course. He can't not know. It's more likely he'd be laughing at me for even considering that last sentence.

In essence, Bowie is a cultural phenomenon precisely as a cultural statement, the statement being the phenomenon, the stating of this in itself. The phenomenon comes before what it may contain? Maybe, maybe not, but in any case it's inseparable. And I'm not suggesting that the content of the phenomenon itself is meaningless, drivel, pointless or anything like that at all, but the content is a separate consideration to the other inextinguisable element, the phenomenon.

The cultural statement in the cultural phenomenon speaks the embodiment of the personality cult, of the mad individual in society. There are, of course, elements of tradintional art obsessions such as the artist in society and the romantic notion of the society against the expressive, visionary or just sensitive individual - but in the cultural statement and phenomenon these have been designed to have gone to haywire proportions, intentially and from the blueprints, it seems. For the phenomenon, for the statement. "Love me in it", Bowie is saying in making the quite complex cultural phenomenon itself. (I wonder how close he gets to spelling this out. Not being a proper Bowie fan, it would take me some time to go through his stuff to try to see if there are times he gets obviously close to an out and out statement. My guess is he is so contained in character(s) and the phenomenon and the statement, he does not even envisage that he would allow himself to get close to "opening up".)

 That the traditional concerns of artists are made to really extreme proportions - again, the artist in society gone absolutely haywire - may be the only point of them within this cultural phenomenon. (In one sense, Mahler or Wagner may express the painful yet perhaps divine like notion of the artist in society but neither danced across a stage blaring it from their lungs, personally drawing you into this notion as it they were that and maybe significantly only that. The individuality of the individual is a major concern but as extreme voyeurism in culture, in peoples' faces, down their trannies, on their screens, in pubs, everywhere. And it is for the massess. This was mass appeal cult appeal voyeurism as if even in establishing in some artistically playful way a real sect, a real cult of worship as definitive in the cultural phenomenon. Interspersed in the man's career are definitions, elements, storylines of it, the voyeuristic, extremely distinguished individual as cultural phenomenon itself: The Man Who Fell To Earth, Starman (There's a starman. Yes a star, man. Guess who it is?)

It's distinct.

Regular BBC Review Show critic Natalie Haynes mentioned that her era was after mainstream Bowie, so after most of the real fuss, after much of the real phenomenon itself. (But it is something which can't really die to give way for a pure musician that was never bound up it in.) That was a more restrained, perhaps sensible and mindful area in culture - the 80s and 90s. It did not have so much time for the mad personality cult as art and cultural plan, being very, and gradually more and more, obsessed with the genuine cult of the self (whether part of the 'Me' era and generation or a purer, higher concern than what's now often seen as the time of greed, or the time for the development of greed). The genuine cult of the self has since become lost in the ingenuine, aimless anti-cult cult of the self pretending still to be a true, pure cult of the self. This modern, much more unfortunate reality, can appear like a certain American TV series involving a plane crash that went on and on and on - seemingly endlessly and without aim - as much as it was incomprehensible.

Now, in this post Lost age, an absolutely out and out, down and out, lost age which even yet still pretends we are allied to the genuine cult of self, there returns an obsession with a kind of personality cult (back since its diminution in the early 80s). This modern revision of the era of glam rock etcetera personality cults comes within the ingenuine cult of the self pretending to be a pure cult of self - in pretend obsessions with any and every empty cultural phenomenon instead of troubadors or minstrels in music. Pretend you like it. Just pretend. Don't mean it, naturally. (Just what did Bowie, Glitter and so on bring about?)

[How strange that Groove Armada suddenly insert the Blade Runner syth theme by Vangelis into their BBC mix I'm listening to as I write, at the very instant when I'm typing to describe this modern era in popular culture. I used to imagine the Blade Runner world could have pretend obsessions particularly made instead of music, for the masses to practise or merely enjoy their unparticular fauning on or something. But nicely. if that's possible, nicely - however personally misguided.Not with music that, if examined truly, is so unlikely to spawn any such attributable personality cults. -I remember from the early 90s, I liked very much Blade Runner and imagined I loved the world of Blade Runner. (Groove Armada 6 Mix, 15.03.2013, available free in Soundcloud.com)].

In the post Lost age, even the good parts are defined by obsession with cultural phenomeons, making personality cults where possible, whether that be Bowie, Daft Punk or the constant recycling of The Rolling Stones, or a new boy band too insignificant in terms of what real culture means to actually listen to properly. (Unless you're 11 years old, maybe female, also for males, and just find attraction in the 'youth' spirit and energy of the age alone, regardless of what they do.) The latter is the more usual face of this fake era of pretend obsessions instead of music - from Lady Gaga to Perry, Eminem, Minaj, Beiber, things appear back with the obsessive cultural phenomenae of the era of Bowie and glam. But is there really anything serious in there now at all? Beyond the money and people somehow screaming at nothing, or to these ears, less than zero - whether they can control it or not?

Natalie Haynes mentions her era was that of Under Pressure, the Bowie collaboration with so-called rock gods Queen and that, that being the "worst of Bowie" and the "worst of Queen", she missed the opportunity to know the real phenomenon, what it had been all about, what it was, what it was like to experience, what it meant.

I felt myself seeing a clear definition of just what Bowie was (and, as said, must still be, this being inextricable), just how abnormal for such huge success in mainstream culture a year or so before he really established himself. Even how abnormal within a type of that time he existed within a clear set of - even though this kind of stance grew rather quickly. I found myself thinking about Haynes's remark that Under Pressure was the worst of both, and couldn't help quickly noting personally that it couldn't be the worst of Queen for me. To these ears Queen made countless abysmal records and their, to me sickening, sheerly attention seeking, theatrical paen in performance is every music hall show too far for me.

However, the point I want to make is that naturally I wondered if  Under Pressure could be the worst of Bowie, and realised there was no answer really. If I were being true to what I saw and felt. With Queen I coudl easily see a catalogue of theatrical musical releases, and subjectively make a preferential analysis that, though I loathed Under Pressure, I could listen to it for maybe 40 seconds before running to switch the radio channel. Where with most other Queen songs, generally this time would be less than a second before my legs would take to the air, running to the radio for as quick a change as possible. But, what Queen were, in essence were musical showmen, yes, performers, songsters, crooners, if you will, still the old minstrels in some way even if they raked around your head with so-called energy and surprise, rather than settled, soothed and inspired it.

Now Bowie. The distinction is it didn't matter with Bowie what it could mean that a song could be the worst of him. (This is not at all suggesting I thought Bowie 'worse' than Queen, far from it.) It made no sense to say Under Pressure could be the worst of Bowie - there was no clear way to see, it meant nothing. Because, from the vantage of decades of relative removal, even though I can appreciate some of his music a lot, that was irrelevant. I couldn't even see him particularly as a musician, distinctly - good, bad or indifferent, a heartfelt performer or nonplussed, genuine nor fake.

No, he's art. Art. (I mean the man in his public work himself, nothing to do with him being an exhibition subject currently.) Art, merely that and even perhaps with him, it's possible for many to cut through the music and see him only as art - performance art as cultural phenomenon.



to be continued ...