I need more RAM

The more I listen to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, the more I like it. Here’s why.

There are different sides of this album I’m enjoying, but it’s pretty hard to describe them all. First of all, something I didn’t expect is happening: I found myself listening to this album from the beginning to the end, more than one time. Like an old vinyl, you just hit play and relax. The story begins. Well, I actually never played a vinyl, but come on I’m trying to make a point here. This got me thinking because the iTunes/Spotify/blablabla culture is definitely a song-oriented culture, not an album-oriented one, and I was influenced by it a lot.

This is not a ‘concept album’ in the strict sense, but it’s definitely a coherent, cohesive, powerful piece of work you can enjoy in its entirety.

The album makes me think of those movies made by directors who want to pay tribute to the authors who inspired them, and this way they actually create new original material based on that cultural universe. Sometimes these work don’t just include explicit references, but actual material - like actors, basically just being themselves - from previous works. Somebody said Django? Yeah, that. But let’s not talk about it.

Back to Daft Punk’s effort, you could argue that they basically created something new with something old, but really they took a step backwards to take a hundred steps forward. If mashup itself is an art form, this is something even more ambituos. Since I’m not a musician or a djay or a music ‘expert’, I think I shouldn’t go further than that.

Also, the progressive bits are making my head spin. This isn’t just virtuosism: there’s a fundamental ‘narrative’ component in almost every song that adds a different dimension to it.

This isn’t just music, it’s storytelling.

But isn’t that what music should always be about?

PS: Sorry for the joke in the title. Maybe you didn’t even get it.