Last Night, I Had a Dream About You (In Brooklyn)

First thing's first: Sorry for my long absence from this blog. Just got a new, very temporary seasonal job -- please, don't ask me what it is because I may just burst into tears, college diploma in hand -- with absolutely shitty hours and by the time my eight-hour day ends at 2 p.m. (you do the math), I'm usually wiped. I'm reminded of that City High song, "What Would You Do?", except replace all that stuff about being hooker, baby mamas and smoking crack with...watering flowers.

My point is, I promise you, ye ole' faithful readers of this (rather amateurish) blog, that I will do my best to provide my particularly awesome brand of movie and music commentary every week and hopefully more. Pinky swear!

Now to the real business at hand...

Last week I drove down to New York City with a very special birthday present in hand: a ticket to see Daft Punk live in Brooklyn. (Thanks Mom and Dad!) And on last Thursday night, a pyramid-shaped spaceship with two cyborg commanders landed at Keyspan Park in Coney Island and preceded to blow everyone's minds. This, of course, was expected: since their now-legendary performance at Coachella last year, Daft Punk have been the hottest ticket around at nearly every subsequent venue they've played. What I wasn't prepare for was the sheer seismic energy Daft Punk generated with what could really be boiled down to as some lights, some live mixing, some robot helmets and some couple thousand people.

I'm not about to attempt to convert those who doubt Daft Punk's status as one of the best acts in pop music today, because if you haven't already recognized their visionary distillations of techno, house, disco, R&B, Europop and everything in-between, their brilliant inversions of pop structures and formulas, or their innovative and refreshing uses of repetition and looping, you probably never will. For those believers and fans, however, seeing Daft Punk live not only proves all their incredible skill and talent, but enriches their already classic material in new and exciting ways. Not content to simply spin an unfiltered collection of their greatest hits (although that too would probably be pretty dope), the duo of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter instead build their towering pop metropolis synth by sinewy synth, beat by movie-sized beat, and hook by trance-inducing hook. The experience was not unlike entering a brave, new outer-space world (the show opens with a nod to Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and plunging head-long into a black hole, lights and songs bending in extraordinary, sometimes phantasmagoric ways.

From the opening, head-banging blasts of "Robot Rock" to the unreal encore which cleverly reprised "One More Time" with an unexpected dose of Stardust's 1998 classic dance cut, "Music Sounds Better With You" (which DP's Bangalter wrote and produced with Alan Braxe), the group tore shit up, for lack of a better phrase. One of the best things to likely come out of this Daft Punk tour is the critical reappraisal of the group's last LP, Human After All. I was among the many disappointed with that record, but hearing the likes of "Prime Time of Your Life", "Television Rules the Nation", the title track and, hell, even "Technologic" played over those mega speakers, it's not hard to think that DP imagined Human After All not for earphone or MP3 consumption, but as monolithic pop music to pulverize stadium audiences. Even with the night's sweaty, raved-up and rave-ready crowd, Daft Punk managed to not only rope in the masses crowd with every ecstatic transition (the introduction of "Around the World", as mixed with "Television", gave me goosebumps of the best kind), but generated a startling amount of intimacy between themselves and the throngs of devotees, as well as make the evening just as much about the act of concert-going as the actual concert itself. Personally, what made seeing Daft Punk so deeply affecting and special for me had just as much to do with dancing like an idiot with my friends as anything else that night. Rare is the occasion when an artist achieves this raptorous relationship with the music and the experience. Daft Punk did that and so much more.

All this having been said, I haven't even discussed the curious and rather sad omission of "Digital Love" -- my favorite Daft Punk song and one of the very best pop songs of forever and ever. For such a beloved song, it was quite a surprise not to hear even a fragment or section of the song mixed into the set.

I'm not complaining, though. It still feels like I'm awaking for a long, glorious dream awash in neon lights. Plus, I'm still sore from dancing.