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My personal list would look a little different-”Heartbeat” by Taana Gardner, “Love Thang” by First Choice, “Haven’t You Heard” by Patrice Rushen, “I Want Your Love” by Chic, “Love Hangover” by Diana Ross, “Put Your Body In It” by Stephanie Mills-and the male singers would end up seriously outnumbered. Even the most mainstream list of the greatest disco songs ever would include Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, and Diana Ross alongside the Bee Gees and Michael Jackson. Not counting the robots, RAM includes male vocals on six tracks and not a single female vocal.

How is that possible?Įven on the most superficial level, it’s a failure. Somehow Daft Punk masterminded, created, and delivered an audacious, ambitious, critically-acclaimed tribute to disco music without including a single shard of femininity.

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The interview series simply foreshadowed the full hour-plus album. Where the hell was Donna, the Queen of Disco? In an interview series leading up to the album’s release, Daft Punk released eight episodes on RAM's primary collaborators: Noah.

Across their discography, the mysteriously masked duo has toyed with their own identities (are they robots or human after all?) and yet in a world where music has accelerated mindlessly toward digital precision, the robots managed to make their most human music yet.īut in spite of my love and appreciation for the album, I can’t help but ask: where are the women? Perhaps best of all, RAM offers a richly satisfying chapter in the Daft Punk saga. From the glamorous, cursive album font (borrowed straight from Thriller ) to the Soul Train vibes in the music video for “Lose Yourself to Dance” down to the classic Columbia red label on the vinyl print, everything about the album’s release resembled an album release from the late 70s-or at least how one might have imagined it. With RAM, they went a step further by seeking to mimic not just the sound of their predecessors but also the entire aesthetic. Since Daft Punk read a roll call of their influencers on “Teachers” (off their debut album Homework), the duo has been intimately connected with their musical tradition. Thanks to the half-decade and more than a million dollars Daft Punk invested in the album’s production, audiophiles cite RAM as one of the best sounding records of the century.

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But it goes way beyond professional playing. Like any EDM album you hear these days, it doesn’t contain a single drumbeat out of place or bassline whose tone drags too long. It’s not just “Touch.” In a nod to the music culture that helped spawn Steely Dan’s Aja, RAM is an engineering marvel. Daft Punk revealed that “Touch,” the album’s centerpiece (featuring a quaint, almost showtunes-like verse sung by Paul Williams), is in fact composed of 250 separate tracks-a universe of sound masterfully choreographed across eight beautiful minutes. In spite of its analog quality, RAM would not have been possible without modern technology. Almost a visceral reaction to the digital excesses of electronic dance music (EDM)-a revolution that Daft Punk helped catapult into the mainstream with their legendary glowing pyramid and pounding house music on the Alive 2007 tour-the duo spun in the opposite direction, deciding to work with analog equipment and professional session musicians with decades of experience in the industry. Instead, from the album’s marketing campaigns to the music itself, RAM was a monumental effort by Daft Punk to pay tribute to the golden era of American disco. A resounding critical and commercial success, the album marked a stark departure from house music, French touch, and minimalism, the stylistic elements most commonly associated with the electronic music duo. Five years ago Daft Punk released the most ambitious album of their career: Random Access Memories.