‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: The Day the Robots Took Over

Grunge. Wu-Tang Clan. Radiohead. “Wonderwall.” The music of the ’90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the era—and why does it still matter? 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for 30 final episodes (and a brand-new book!) to try to answer those questions. Join Ringer music writer and ’90s survivor Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 99 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Daft Punk and “Around the World.” Below is an excerpt of this episode’s transcript.

Here we got the band Darlin’, a fuzzy Parisian rock trio named after a Beach Boys song and consisting of Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and Laurent Brancowitz. That song is called “Darlin’” as well; it’s anyone’s guess which one of these three dudes is responsible for that bitchin’ guitar tone. Darlin’ put out like two songs on Stereolab’s label, that’s pretty cool, and Darlin’ receive, for their efforts, a dismissive review in the weekly British music magazine Melody Maker; specifically, the review infamously dismisses Darlin’ as “daft punky thrash.” Rock-criticism-wise, in retrospect, this of course is one of the most well-known mean reviews written by anybody about anything in the 1990s. Darlin’ breaks up. Laurent goes off and joins another semi-fuzzy Parisian rock band called Phoenix, and Phoenix doesn’t start blowing up until the 2000s. And it doesn’t really blow up until like 2009, but for your reference here’s what Phoenix is up to in 1999.

That song’s called “Heatwave,” and I think our buddy Laurent is gonna do just fine. Meanwhile, Guy-Manuel and Thomas form a new group called Daft Punk, who debut, fairly quietly, in 1994, with a tune called “The New Wave,” long before it is clear to everyone that that is what they are.

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I appreciate how mildly abrasive that is. Musically, Daft Punk comes from a mildly abrasive background, a DIY background, a punk-in-spirit background, a “rock with ambitions beyond rock” background. In that rude codpiece 1997 Melody Maker interview with Daft Punk, Guy-Manuel talks up the 1991 Primal Scream album Screamadelica as “one of the albums first to set off an explosion in our heads.” Screamadelica mixed chill psychedelic rock with house music, and acid house, and the pretty druggy and super-English dance-rock subgenre known as baggy. Like the pants. Super English. Can I tell you real quick about the time I got this stuck in my head for a long weekend?

This is the Primal Scream song “Don’t Fight It,” comma, “Feel It.” And I took my family, including three kids, on a road trip to a lake house in Michigan, and one of those kids was a baby, and the drive was chaos the whole time, what with all the snacks and bathroom breaks and noisy kids and ennui. And I’ve got Screamadelica playing at a reasonable volume in the minivan, and I get just that little chirping sound—joot joot joot joot-joot, joooot joot joot joot—stuck in my head for 72 as I shift into Hardcore Dad Mode. All that child wrangling and minivan driving and I’ll-turn-this-minivan-around threatening. The whole time: joot joot joot joot-joot, joooot joot joot joot. It was awesome. I was operating at Maximum Dad Efficiency the whole time. I am not going to check with my wife to see if she thinks I was operating at Maximum Dad Efficiency at that time, because that would ruin the illusion.

So maybe Daft Punk start here, somewhere around here. Screamadelica sets off an explosion in their heads, but Screamadelica cannot define or contain that explosion. In Melody Maker, Thomas, who’s like 22 at this point, he talks about how quickly Daft Punk grew disillusioned with “rock” in any form. “Maybe when we were 16 and at gigs, Dinosaur Jr., Primal Scream, rock was OK. But then at 17, we looked around and thought, ‘What is the point of these guys, doing nothing?’ The gigs were full of people doing nothing and we felt we were wasting our time, so young, in this kind of place.” Meaning Paris. Early to mid-’90s Paris, where house music is much more prominent, and disco—never dead, never demolished—is much more prominent, and there ain’t much grunge or even cod-grunge happening anywhere. The next Daft Punk single, out in 1995, is called “Da Funk,” and here’s your new wave.

I tell people that episode to episode, I pick the songs for this show arbitrarily, because I do, but maybe I don’t. You ever think of that? Maybe I have an ingenious yearslong well-thought-out master plan with lots of cool, deliberate song-to-song, episode-to-episode continuity. Yeah? It’s possible. Let’s go with that, actually. Thomas talking about “Da Funk” to the Swedish magazine Pop #23 (not available in Ohio, this magazine), Thomas says, and I quote, “It was around the time Warren G’s ‘Regulate’ was released and we wanted to make some sort of gangsta rap and tried to murk our sounds as much as possible. However, no one has ever compared it to hip hop. We’ve heard that the drums sound like Queen and the Clash, the melody is reminiscent of [Italian disco giant] Giorgio Moroder, and the synthesizers sound like electro and thousands of other comparisons. No one agrees with us that it sounds like hip-hop.” Ha! I don’t agree with Daft Punk either about the hip-hop thing, but more importantly, see? “Regulate” was the last episode. Cool continuity. I got a master plan. This song sounded awesome on college radio, even if I barely had any context for it.

“Da Funk” is structured like a rock song. Like a pop song. Like a stadium anthem. “Da Funk” has cool, deliberate internal continuity. The author and critic Michaelangelo Matos, in his 2015 book, The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America, writes, “‘Da Funk’ was a bombshell: not merely a French house record, one that sounded and felt French even as it was clearly indebted to Chicago.” (The birthplace of house music.) He goes on. “It was the emerging ‘French Touch’ DJ style—the club-based house approach of DJs like Martin Solveig, David Guetta, and Nick Nice, full of disco loops going in and out of aural focus after being sent through whooshing low-pass filters—manifested on a recording. ‘Da Funk’ worked like a pop record, building and cresting and layering with verse-chorus logic far beyond the simple ‘filter-disco’ of much mid-’90s house.”

Can I tell you two things? One thing that makes me sound very cool and then another thing that makes me sound like the biggest dork you ever heard of in your life? OK. The cool thing first. If we’re talking the original 1995 single version of “Da Funk,” I prefer the original B-side, a quite pleasingly abrasive acid-house song called “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.”

It’s pretty cool of me, how much I like that song, “Rollin’ & Scratchin’,” right? OK. The other thing. The mortifying, uncool Biggest Dork You Ever Heard Of thing. When people write about disco, any era of disco, you often see the phrase “four on the floor beats,” so it’s in 4/4 time with a kick drum going boom boom boom boom / one two three four. Four on the floor. But I personally avoid this phrase, when writing or speaking or thinking, because I am still very embarrassed by the fact that the first few times I encountered this phrase, “four on the floor,” or in fact perhaps the first several thousand times I encountered this phrase, I thought “four on the floor” meant “on your hands and knees on the dance floor,” and I was like, Well, that’s inappropriate dance-floor behavior. Oh my God. I am not entirely convinced that “four on the floor” doesn’t mean “on your hands and knees.” It would be just like the elitist global dance-music community to spend decades now conspiring to embarrass me by making me think I was wrong about that. Get your hands and knees off that dance floor, it’s dirty!

There’s your whooshing filters going in and out of aural focus. Daft Punk’s debut album, Homework, comes out in early 1997. Pick your favorite song. Lots of options. Don’t be embarrassed, though, if you pick “Around the World.”

To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.