But I Was There: Daft Punk @ the LA Sports Arena, 7/21/07

FORESHADOWING

Daft Punk, "Face to Face" - The older I get, the more the world makes it apparent that I perceive the unfolding of history - or at least musical history - in an incalculably skewed sense. It's probably an overwhelmingly obvious point to make, but since I (and, if you're reading this blog, probably you too) tend to gravitate towards more marginal artists and musical idioms, the march of time has a way of revealing what I understand at the time to be epic, world-changing events to "just" be really fun shows; I may have had a better time seeing LCD Soundsystem at the Echo back in 2004 more than any other concert I've ever attended, but even within the then-volatile context of "dancepunk" or "the DFA" or even "indie music" in general, it changed absolutely nothing for anyone who wasn't in attendance that night, although anyone who was there and came away with anything other than a life-affirming spectacle in no way deserves to call themselves a fan of anything for the rest of their lives. I did, however, see Daft Punk at Coachella last year, and if their performance at the Sports Arena last Saturday taught me one thing, it's that I was absolutely there for at least one musical Ground Zero, even if the consequences of said event haven't necessarily fully unveiled themselves to me just yet.

For one, it's clear to me that no performance Daft Punk will ever put on could even approach their Coachella set even if just to kiss the ring. Admittedly, the Los Angeles factor may have hardwired me for disappointment to a certain extent; my adopted hometown is, after all, the place where the country turns when it needs instructions on how to best appropriate someone else's experience, so it's not like I was surprised to see a bunch of frat-bros-turned-indie-dance-snobs attempting to out-enjoy the rapturous reviews of what went down that night in the desert rather than simply appreciate the show being put on in front of them. Inexplicably, some of them seemed to fail to glean even the most incidental shred of pleasure from the evening's festivities, resulting in the disruption of what would have been a sea of people leaping into the air consumed by a singular desire to howl along with "One More Time" with intermittant dudes in black shirts and backwards-turned baseball caps unwilling to respond beyond nodding their heads in a show of Serious Appreciation; justice will only be served on the day that each and every one of these people get raped by a horse in front of their parents. There's also the not-insubstantial factor that the Sports Arena's soundsystem could be adequately described as "pathetic"; whereas the mids were crystal clear at Coachella, last weekend they sounded more or less as if the speakers had been tipped over onto the carcass of a grizzly bear. Yet while neither of these situations were ideal (to say the butt-fuckin' least), they're really just symptoms of the show rather than descriptors; I have a bunch of friends going to their show in Seattle, and I'm pretty sure they'll come back with a similar set of complaints.

No, what was missing from last Saturday's show was - if you'll pardon the pun - the element of discovery. People who only heard about Daft Punk throwing the bombest live shows in the history of bombitute through the internet's collective push to gush over their Coachella set rarely even hear about the fact that, until those tones from Close Encounters ambled out of the speakers, nobody in the audience had a fucking clue as to what to expect. After all, not only had Daft Punk not played live in something like six years, but they were fresh off releasing Human After All, an album I still consider earth-shakingly disappointing; it might have been overpoweringly improbable that they'd drop a set that would diminish Discovery or Homework in retrospect, but as anyone who saw New Order the year before could probably tell you, that certainly didn't eliminate the possibility that their set - their big, triumphant, return-to-form performance - might be really, really boring. Part of me still thinks that all the attendees' post-coital glow centered in large part around the fact that they just didn't suck - I mean, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but all fleeting moments of introspection that I took away from that set as it was in the process of being assembled in front of me all expressed sentiments like "Holy shit, am I actually enjoying Human After All?!"

It's also important to consider that in many ways, that Coachella set laid out a blueprint for how dance music might be able to present itself as a mass-market arena commodity. Their set, after all, wasn't a rave, which is a nice way of saying that it was in no way a simple pretext for people to take drugs and try to fuck each other; Daft Punk explicitly came to put on a show which would in no way compromise one's capacity to lose one's shit to the fullest extent physically available. Nobody - and I mean nobody - in that tent was turned to face their partner or some oblique light source or, really, anything except that pyramid. In retrospect, it's a pretty genius move if only because of the intractability at the heart of Daft Punk's music; songs like "Harder Better Faster Stronger" are events, not part of the diegetic soundtrack of your life. I kinda think that it's this aspect of their set which kept it at the forefront of my mind during the Great Justice Echoplex Annihilation of Dickety-Seven - just because the Ed Banger dudez' show might have been exponentially lower-tech (e.g. swapping out jaw-droppingly forbidding pyramid technology for the sight of Steve Aoki coming utterly unglued in front of God and Jesus and the Cobrasnake and everyone) didn't make it any easier to ignore, which kinda seemed like the point. "These guys", Daft Punk's set seemed to teach the crowd of rapturously eager students, "aren't here to soundtrack your night - these guys are your night until it just gets unbearable under those helmets."

Like I said, at the Sports Arena, this was pretty much common knowledge, and I feel pretty confident in saying that I'm not just interpreting the evening's festivities along my own perceptions when I say that. My first inkling came courtesy of the aforementioned assembled frat-bros; my second came when SebastiAn and Kavinsky took the stage for twenty minutes in between Ratatat's crushingly boring set and Daft Punk's, well, Daft Punkery and with the exception of the stragglers determined to have a Very Conspicuous Night of Fun and Dancing Which Involves Invading Neighbors' Space at all costs, the crowd all but stood at attention waiting for the preordained moment at which Daft Punk would take the stage and render it OK to become unhinged. Almost to an individual, these folks all conjured up the image of nothing so much as someone who's heard their friends (or, worse, their internet friends) spend the last fifteen months gushing about that time when they layered "Crescendolls" on top of "Around the World" and dude you just wouldn't believe it dude, which is fine if we're being fair (after all, the only way to have avoided it would have necessitated the whole world being able to fit under that tent last year) but, in practice, kinda left me feeling like I was about to be accused of plagarism for a paper I'd sweat bullets getting right. History has taught me that in situations like that, fairness can go fuck itself; the truth is that the Coachella set's spirit of HOLY SHITness is - was - gone forever, and any attempt to revisit it in the future would involve slamming into an impenetrable wall of scenefuckers. C'est la vie, as our robot overlords might say.

But that's the negative interpretation of the night's events, which, as anyone who saw me that night can tell you, in no way reflected the sheer transplendence of the amazing time I had. I danced so recklessly that by the time we filed out I practically looked like I'd just been birthed; I honestly can't think of another instance in my life where I actually managed to sweat all the way through a pair of blue jeans, for god's sake. Can you blame me? Last Saturday might not have been Coachella, but that doesn't make it any less enthrallingly awesome to find yourself in a crowd of tens of thousands of folks singing along to "Face To Face" - I mean, Johnny-come-latelys or not, that's still an impressive song for a whole crowd of otherwise presumably dance-apathetic Americans to know every word by heart. And don't get me started on the encore (an item lacking from their Coachella performance in the sorest of ways); I'm trying not to spoil it for the two people I know who read this blog and have plans to see 'em in Seattle, but let's just say that it was more than a little awesome to hear them annihilating Thomas Bangalter's remixes to cap off the hour they'd just spent doing the same to their collective work. Seriously, don't even get me started.

And anyway, the most revealing aspect of the night was such an uncompromisingly positive one that it's hard for EVEN ME to dwell on the negativity, by which I mean the degree to which the show was sold out. By "sold out", I hasten to add that this wasn't one of those "sold out" shows where half the arena's simply blacked out - I mean every seat had an ass in it and every square inch of floor space had someone laying claim to it. I saw kids who must have been in elementary school when Discovery came out rocking Daft Punk shirts and losing their shit under parental supervision up in the seats. I saw tens of thousands of people become anthropomorphic shrieks when the light show started to extend from the pyramid to the walls of the Arena. I saw idiots who bolted for the door before the encore on the receiving end of the kind of glares normally reserved for people who cut in line at the DMV. In short, I saw one hell of a show which, despite not being as awesome as one of the very best things at which I've ever pointed my eyes in the twenty-six years I've spent on this planet so far, kicked a ton of ass and took a ton of names despite coming to the one place on earth best equipped to turn its nose up at the proceedings, and came away without a single reason to consider their tour anything other than the live show with the best chance of being viable until the principle figures shuffle on off this mortal coil. I do believe I can live with that. (Click here to buy Discovery from Amazon.com if for some inexplicable reason you've managed to live your empty little life without it to this point)

The Rakes, "We Danced Together" (SebastiAn remix) - I freely admit that I was actually more excited to see SebastiAn (and to a lesser extent Kavinsky)'s set than Daft Punk's; for one, I'd seen the latter's show before (did I mention that yet?), and for another, I hear SebastiAn absolutely breaks his foot off in his audience's ass. Sadly, as previously detailed, this simply wasn't the case last weekend due to the LA equivalent of a swarm of bridge-&-tunnel folk, although these people came predictably (and, to be fair, quite justifiably) alive at the sound of his remix of Rage Against The Machine's "Bulls On Parade". Still, his set did an admirable job of showcasing the brute force of his approach - even playing his song selections relatively safe for the benefit of those present who'd never heard of dancing before Pitchfork admitted to hopping on the good foot for "We Are Your Friends", he still managed to pick a lineup of songs with a throughline of uncompromising physicality; all of his technical shortcomings as a DJ (and I'm specifically referring to the relative gracelessness of some of his transitions) were handily overcome by his gift to pick songs which hit you in the sternum with full force. He actually never played his mix of "We Danced Together", presumably because it's a slow loping beast and the order of the evening was an unalloyed footrace into an electro-disco singularity, but much to my neighbors' dismay I've been listening to it a whole lot ever since anyway. The contrast between Force and Not Force laid so elegantly bare by that One Big Sweeping Swelling Dropout about a minute into the song simply serves as far too tempting an allegory for the contrast between when SebastiAn was behind the decks and when he, for lack of a more precise term, wasn't; if the twenty minutes he spent onstage with some dude pretending to be an undead hotrodder are any indication, I need to see him live in a more intimate, less douchebag-filled environment in the worstest of ways. Of course, I'm sure he'll just end up playing, like, Cinespace one Tuesday night, although even that way at least I'll still get half of what I want. (Click here to buy the "We Danced Together" CDS from Amazon)

Celestial Choir, "Stand on the Word" (Larry Levan remix) - And fuck it, as long as I'm throwing up stuff that everyone reading this has already heard eleventy billion times, I figure I might as well throw up THE GREATEST SONG IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, which Larry Levan's transcendent retooling of a gospel howler into an absolute weapon of ass destruction engineered to kick celebrations of secular debauchery into absolute overdrive. Oddly enough, this song seems to have gone at least formally uncanonized during the last few years' elevation of Levan from marginalized crusader into a full-stop canon-eradicating icon; I know it still gets dapped out by JD Twitch and Justice (seriously, if you can't hear the seeds of "D.A.N.C.E." in here, you wholeheartedly deserve the mediocrity to which you most assuredly attain), but "Stand on the Word" shows up on neither any of the last half-decade's Levan compilations nor even friggin' iTunes, and nobody on this world or any other has yet to give me a good reason as to why that might be. As such, it kinda feels like if this song is to survive - which it may well be doing; I may have never heard it at a club, but I freely admit that that and twenty bucks will get you a blowjob from a daytime hooker - it's got to do so on the strength of word of mouth, and I kinda like that; "Stand on the Word" is very much one of those songs which feels practically designed to be venerated as a sacred object, and the best way to go about that involves preaching to the choir, if you will. And I swear to anyone or anything to which you would ask me to swear that I'm not just posting this as an excuse to whip out my Cock of Wit - but you'll just have to give it a listen to make sure, won't you? (Juno somehow seems to have a few copies of this left in stock; I strongly urge you to click here and buy one.) (EDIT: Well, as usual I'm apparently an idiot; check the comments for details. I swear to you that Perpetua credited this to Levan when I copped it from Fluxblog eleven billion years ago, though. In any event, this in no way keeps me from calling it THE GREATEST SONG IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE.)