A user emailed this across and although we’re trying to avoid anything too Daft Punk related this did resonate with us and paints a pretty stark scene of originality within today’s dance/electronic world.

Foreword: Since the beginnings of popular music (and even classical) there is an inevitable and unfortunately almost irreversible event that occurs within the lifespan of a certain genre or musical movement. Within each era of musical innovation there are two kind of of musicians, one being the innovator and the other being the replicator, the latter of which always leads to the subsequent death of the genre. We’ve often heard the phrase “rap died after Tupac” or “so and so were the last real punk/rock band” however, in this current age of music I have never been more disenchanted by popular music and here’s a bunch of reasons why…

p.s this discussion/vent/manifesto will most likely make me seem like a cynical, pretentious dick, but I feel the need to let people know what’s going on in my mind about this.

I’ll start with DaftPunk., recently dubbed by Fatboy Slim as the last ‘real musical powerhouse’. People seem to have great faith in their new album and how it will undeniably restore balance to the world in this current musical apocalypse. Daft Punk’s latest single ‘Get Lucky’ has set new play count records across many streaming websites, leading to immense hype for an album that I believe will essentially be a poor rehash of classic disco acts such Chic, Donna Summer, The Whispers, Tavares… the list is endless. This is not to say I don’t like Daft Punk, in fact I own all their albums (even the musical flop ‘Human After All’) but how much faith can you place in an act that hasn’t made a good song in 13 years? Just as what happened in the build up to Justice’s latest album ‘Civilization’, people are getting immensely caught up in the whole spectacle of it all. Daft Punk have literally done exactly the same thing as Justice, deciding to move on from their days of creating incredible sample based music; they have made the excellent choice of making throwback music that takes a backseat to the incredible production value of the originals they clearly aspire to be like. People are getting more excited about the long list of incredible feature collaborators that will appear on this album than even considering the musical credibility of the album. Listen to their single ‘Get Lucky’, sure it’s catchy for maybe the first minute or so, but listen very carefully and you’ll notice that nothing changes AT ALL. It’s not even tasteful repetition, it just seems they were so stoked that they made a decent four bar progression that they were content to just keep it going throughout the whole 4 minutes with nothing but a simple solo thrown over the top. Wow, revolutionary! They truly are the last musical powerhouse of our time. Don’t misunderstand me, I am ready to be pleasantly surprised by this new album but if the tracks are anything like ‘Get Lucky’ it will get really tired, really quickly.

This leads on to my point about the fickle nature of the consumer. If something is thrown in front of them enough, eventually it will catch on and become the next big thing. I find the whole nature of consumerist radio completely repugnant leading to my getting more depressed about it than any other far more pressing issue in society.

I understand that some people simply don’t have an interest in discovering non-commercial music. Like most things it’s kind of a hobby and if you aren’t into then so be it. However, even in the last ten years the music that has been featured on the air waves has been concentrated into such a small range of uninspired EDM mashed with autotuned RnB vocals that when something like the new Daft Punk album comes along they will be regarded as great innovators by these same people who never had any interest in finding music for themselves. This is what makes me mad. Even 9 years ago, listening to RNB and rap and stuff I would be surprised by how samey it all sounded, but it doesn’t even begin to hold a candle to the level of replication that goes on in today’s popular music (and yes I will repeat this has been going on since the dawn of time but NEVER to this extent.)

Now, onto the Flume phenomenon (similar to the Disclosure phenomenon). I have nothing against Flume or Disclosure and personally I quite like their music. Flume’s track ‘Paper Thin’ and Disclosure’s ‘I love that you know’ are dope tracks in their own rights but these acts represent a phenomenon that happens far too often in the musical world and in no way do these artists’ tracks warrant the amount of attention they’re getting. I remember going to a Flume gig before he was big (yeah whatever, call me a hipster) and there were the same kind of people there, people who were interested in listening to and finding new music (I guess you could call them hipsters as well), but come Parklife next year and you’ve got the same crowd you’d see at an Avicii or Swedish House Mafia concert. I’m not angry at Flume or Disclosure at all, I’m angry at the people that now like him, content with what’s shoved in their faces they happily throw about words like ‘prodigy’ and ‘musical wonderchild’ whilst equally competent artists such as fellow Australian producer Electric Sea Spider remain unknown or buried beneath this massive wave of shit. Same goes for Disclosure or anyone else included in this phenomenon.

A whole bevy of garage and house acts make similar stuff to Disclosure, it’s just a little bit less accessible and more importantly, not played on commercial radio to the same brainwashing extent. And like locusts the listeners swarm on a genre and consume it, which results in a demand in that genre causing EVERYONE to make that kind of music until it no longer holds anymore impact and it is left irreversibly ruined. They then move onto the next thing leaving any musicians who were making that music all along seem like bandwagoners when they were often the people who laid the foundations for that particular genre in the first place.

Not all is lost though, sometimes a band revives an old washed out genre. Take Perth group Tame Impala for instance, who reignited the pyschedelic rock flame with a fresh take on what was once a saturated market – the exception that proves the rule. Who knows, maybe Daft Punk will do this too with ‘Random Access Memories’, I live in hope.