MOHAMMED AL-SALAFI

I can't stop but think how quirky the Daft Punk story ends: Thomas stops walking in the middle of the desert, only to ask Guy to begin the countdown of his own demise. As cold as it gets, Guy continues to walk alone in the middle of the desert heading towards a lush sunrise. The scene ends featuring a part of their track Touch: "Hold on, If love is the answer you hold" I will get back in detail to the story of this track, but oh boy what a way to say goodbye.

This is what we know from the Epilogue we saw yesterday 02.22.21. What you perhaps didn't know is that this scene already took place in 2006 during the movie "Electroma" where they play as robots who live in this robot society, then attempt to mask themselves under the disguise of humans only to be bashed and chased out by their robot society (min 25:00 onwards). So they drive away to the desert, under an identical setting to the scene from the epilogue, EXCEPT that Guy walks to the site of Thomas explosion and collects his remnants and kinda say goodbye (see min 55:00). Guy-Manuel then walks away similarly to the last scene in the epilogue (2021). However, the scene gets darker and ends with Guy setting himself afire as an act of emptiness, after failing to switch himself off (min 59:59). That scene was supposed to be featured in their last album back then "Human Afterall" (2004) which many critics thought as the end of the duo. Only to surprise the world with a comeback with the album "Alive" (2007) and a banging concert that summer. I still think its the most underrated comeback + concert in the history of pop music imo.

Which raises questions on another comeback. In both Electroma and the Epilogue Thomas dies the same way by exploding. Whereas Guy only dies in Electroma and walks away in the Epilogue. Rather an unfinished story?

Moreover, back to "Touch" the track played at the ending of the Epilogue, that generally talks about self-searching (Which btw is considered the most dramatic track Daft Punk ever worked on both in lyrics, storytelling and music. The track was a collab with Paul Williams, who is claimed to be the original source of childhood inspiration of the robots. In an interview Paul says the music keeps you wondering about your origins and purpose. "The track sounds like this alien creature coming out of a coma and experiencing life as if it was for the first time. And then begins soul searching only to fail to uncover who he was, however still finding that love is the answer" If that is not the most divine thing, I do not know what is.

This explains the duo as the most iconic yet underrated musicians of our time. Their originality, perfectionism, elegance and soul, is what renders their music timeless. Or as Todd Edwards (one of the collabs to work with the duo) calls their music: "future classics" bringing that was lost for a very long time, and to be listened to in the future. It's ironic that two androids are bringing soul back to humans in a fashionably elegant way. It's like the most optimized version of future AI musicians.

This claim can be attributed to their technological savviness in exploring music genres and feeding on it as they continuously evolved going from rock (Darlin 1992), to a house-hiphop fusion (Homework 1997), to electro-punk and disco-pop (Discovery 2001), to minimal (Human Afterall, 2005) to a combination of Discovery and Human afterall (Alive 2007), to orchestra and synth waves (scoring the movie Tron Legacy 2011) and lastly, culminating all music genres yet this time making themselves vulnerable by inducing a human factor: Soul, groove and jazz fusion in the making of (Random Access Memories, 2013). Versatility is inherit to their philosophy.

When Discovery was released in 2001, in an interview the duo expressed the intention about opening up to people and the discovering different cultures and identities. The album was presented in a Japanese animation only-music movie titled: Interstella 5555 – The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. The general story of the movie talks about this far future society of intergalactic travel, where the protagonists alien musicians get kidnapped and used by greedy record companies from earth as a commercial tool to make money and gain power of influence, only that the aliens music inadvertently saves humanity from the dark spirits of vested interests. Like Pharrell would say in one of the interviews after the RAM collab: "I like to think of them as good robots. Who came to save humans by taking our music and making it better" A very good reference to the Interstella 5555 story.

Lastly, it's this big idea that music is multidisciplinary and not bound to a certain person nor a certain genre. To double down on the message, the robots intentionally perfected music like no one else did, signaling the role of dedication, grit, hardwork and learning in achieving design and perfection in music with the help of technology while timelessly evolving, and yet still remain humans afterall which is the most important factor in Music, and that is to love music to do it. This I believe is the ultimate message of the robots.

To put things in perspective, the following lyrics from the their track Beyond sums it up:

"A world with time is not allowed

There's no such thing as complication

To find a way we'll lost control

Remember love's our only mission

This is the journey of the soul"