Homework: A Random Access Memory
Friends, musicians and music lovers, lend me your ears. I have come to say goodbye to Daft Punk and even to praise them. They, of course, didn’t wait for me and have said their goodbyes. The pair shared a video titled Epilogue on their YouTube channel. The clip is an excerpt from Daft Punk’s 2006 science fiction film Electroma.
This is the story of how I fell in love with Daft Punk when I was 15. It was 1999. I had lent a mixtape cassette to a friend and that cassette was borrowed by a bully cousin and it had travelled a bit till I got it back. I chased it back to me because I had spent 110 rupees in getting that CD-recorded (not cassette-recorded) mixtape made. I got my cassette case back but without the cassette I had sent out. Instead, I got Daft Punk’s Homework, a LEGAL AND NOT PIRATED pop artifact. Homework is Daft Punk’s 1997 debut album.
You can listen to Homework here.
I listened to Homework on my Aiwa walkman, which was primarily an FM radio because music cassettes were at least a 100 bucks a pop. I expected all Homework tracks to be fun like Around The World. It turned out the album was nothing like anything I had heard before. From what can roughly be called “that neighbourhood” in the 90s international electronic scene: I had heard one full Prodigy album (Fat of the Land), one track by Fatboy Slim and one track by Chemical Brothers but those were different. I had those on the mixtape that got swapped with Homework.
(In retrospect, Prodigy feels like an Electronic Rock boy band. Chemical Brothers still stay legit though and my guess is they will continue to be. I have my issues with Daft Punk’s later years but we’re not here to speak ill of the dead. Maybe it was just that both Daft Punk and I aged differently whereas Chemical Brothers and I aged together.)
In 1999, Homework felt different from any other album I had heard in the manner that it was fun. It was casual. It was the ambient sounds of young people let loose — something I was in a state of longing for at 15. To add to that, they sampled clips from an FM station for the album, making my Aiwa walkman feel better too. All this is still about the aesthetic. So let’s get down to business.
Right after the album’s big hit with the Michel Gondry video (Around The World), there’s Rollin’ and Scratchin’ — an iterative exploration of bass and glitch noises. While till then the liberation of youth had been there only in mood in the album, a true liberation was delivered with Rollin’ and Scratchin’. Rollin’ and Scratchin’ liberated me from what I thought music needed to sound like. It didn’t need to sound like anything as long as I was listening to it and enjoying it.
This was my general learning from the whole album, which is why it saddened me a little to read that Daft Punk were so affected by people’s condescension of them making electronic music that they had to make an album with live instruments. (Of course! Fuck the fucking French, right? Tell me you can hear a bad English actor with a worse French accent fart: “But that’s not really music now, oui?”) This is where Random Access Memories, their most-loved, pop superhit album, came from. I can, only of course, imagine/assume how much pain it must have been to work with real live musicians after being two nerds immersed in machines and producing sounds. But I’m digressing. We’re not here for that.
We’re here for this: As soon as Rollin’ and Scratchin’, the 7-and-half-minute track that broadened my musical tastes, ends, we land in Teachers — a track where all the duo does is list their influences and teachers.
Culturally, being in awe of and grateful to teachers was already a deeply embedded feeling/sanskar in me, a good Gujarati Hindu baniya boy. Hearing French electronic musicians called Daft Punk who had made this sorta electronic, ironic and punk metaphor out of “homework” pay their respects to people named DJ Funk, DJ Sneak, DJ Rush, DJ Hell, DJ Tonka, Dr Dre — people I hadn’t even heard of — broke the image of who or what my teachers should look like. (Note: I didn’t know who Dr Dre was or anything about rap or hiphop at the time.)
DOUBLE RAINBOW!
Now, these two tracks are bang in the center of the Homework cassette album. Rollin’ and Scratchin’ is the last track on side A, Teachers is the first track on side B. MAJJA NI LIFE! #Only90sKids I listened to both these tracks back-to-back without rewinding or fast forwarding anything. Over and over again. While doing or pretending to do my ACTUAL homework.
Epilogue: Later in 1999, I got my mixtape back. The person who had galti-se sent me Homework didn’t want it back. I owned the cassette till about 2007. I had moved onto listening to music on MP3 players and my mobile phone. A friend asked me for my purple handbag full of music cassettes and I passed it along. I have no idea where that tape is. But RIP Daft Punk and RIP that cassette of Homework.
