Daft Punk's Random Access Memories An example of a non-modernist quest for musical value

Abstract

With Random Access Memories (2013), Daft Punk question the supremacy of digital technologies and rehabilitates human performance in contemporary popular music. This approach is not so “backward-looking” as some critics, including Simon Reynolds, have denounced. Although this album’s relationship to history is undeniable, it deserves to be nuanced: the study of the musical facts and the declarations of the artists and their team show that the past, on this album, does not cease to interact with the present, or even the future. While the innovative aspects of Random Access Memories are not related to technology, they are nonetheless a continuation of a deep spirit of "DJ culture" (Poschardt, 2002), which Daft Punk refuse to abandon to standardization as much as to a technicist headlong rush, particularly in the digital field. Through this artistic approach, Daft Punk reveal a multifactorial vision of musical value that breaks away from modernism to raise questions much more contemporary than the retro aesthetics of Random Access Memories would suggest.