It keeps their razors sharp longer

By George & Mike A

@ SEVENMelbourne

The phrase “some things need to be seen to be believed” is most often uttered by a person who has seen the thing to which they are referring;

it’s not often said in reference to a thing that is not seen, and therefore not believed in.

I have no concrete reason not to believe that a Daft Punk tribute band exists, only that it seems so very unlikely. Tribute bands have names like The Strolling Bones, Pink Fraud, and So-asis. They are Jeremy Clarkson saying “at the end of the night, you’re just as drunk, except you’ve only spent a fiver”. They play guitar, and they learn the chords of the songs of the bands that they are emulating so that they can give the off-brand experience, and they are judged by how well they do that.

A Daft Punk record is an assemblage of samples, it shouldn’t matter who plays those samples, making the question of it being the men themselves or not redundant. A real Daft Punk show attracts a bigger crowd than a club playing their record would because... ...because reality is much messier than theory, - even Djs in helmets, who never publicize their real names are celebrities if they sell enough records. But as long as those Djs are not there, the theory should reign supreme.

Thus, the idea of two men dressed as them, playing their songs on what looks like a pair of those digital turn-tables, and a mixer, is something I cannot fully believe. One of those messy intrusions of reality that makes a real Daft Punk show a much bigger event than a fake one is the greater resources for visual effects that they have; they play on top of a giant pyramid for fuck’s sake. They set the bar for imitation a little higher than just being able to play a guitar really well.

Which I suppose would be the point of the night. I suppose it would be about ambition, not realised, but aimed for. -A tribute to coin a term unforgivably hoary.

I have a bit of an obsession with chronicling the differences in practice between electronic/sample-based music, and performance based/rock music. I have a tendency to obsess about these things where others wouldn’t (maybe this piece is evidence of that). Daft Punk always seemed similarly obsessed with those distinctions. Check out the video for Robot Rock, in which the masked men become a masked rock band (strictly for the purposes if the video). Or the constant call-backs to new wave rock imagery in their film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. There are a lot of layers in discussing the complications of an electronica tribute tribute group, so it’s only appropriate that they be a tribute to a group that had fun with these complications to start with.

And after that justification, and the rather impressiveness of their pyramid, it just feels mean to point out that those are obviously spray-painted Star Wars stormtrooper helmets.