The notion that Daft Punk were once underground dance music 'populists' hasn't aged well - the underground isn't associated with many Grammys for best album, and most anti-elitist notions have taken a decidedly right-wing turn in our collective consciousness.

She loves berry pie, Sharpies and giant speaker stacks. – Vivian Host is a journalist, DJ/producer and host of the Rave to the Grave podcast. It doesn't matter if Daft Punk disbands or not because that essence never dies. One of the most popular is a YouTube clip of a very young Daft Punk playing live at Wisconsin rave Even Further in 1996 – a reminder that no matter how many 'Get Lucky''s they might have made in the future, somewhere in there they're still two kids tweaking drum machines relentlessly in the middle of the night. Yet most of the Daft Punk clips surfacing right now are their least stylized they're more about how the group (and especially their live performances) made people feel. Fellow Parisian label Institubes explored a Punk-esque mix of avant-garde ideas and ghetto house, while Berliner Boys Noize is still artfully applying the duo's mixing and compression techniques as he surfs big waves of cheeky-yet-raw European house.

Longtime Daft Punk manager Pedro Winter explored a hundred juicy tangents of the duo's sound with his Ed Banger label: Justice, picking up where 'Robot Rock' left off, took rock distortion in electronic to the nth degree Sebastian and Feadz leaned into dramatic effects and sample cuts Kavinsky's '80s keyboard obsession (and Drive soundtrack) almost single-handedly started synth wave. Younger artists excited me, as they amplified fragments of Daft Punk's vision into whole other styles. This became the 'French touch' sound, with Daft Punk at the center: Guy-Manuel with his Crydamoure label and Thomas Bangalter via Roulé records and Stardust, his collaboration with fellow DJ Alan Braxe (which yielded 1998's inescapable dancefloor sing-along, 'Music Sounds Better With You').

Just as Berlin had a special bond with Detroit techno, Paris and Daft Punk developed a unique relationship with Chicago, applying chic filters, rock distortion and high-gloss mastering to the city's unctuously loopy disco house, squealing acid and raw stripped-back jack trax. 'Teachers,' track nine on their 1997 debut Homework, is a spoken incantation of influences that name-checks Midwest greats like Paul Johnson, DJ Sneak, DJ Rush, Romanthony and DJ Deeon – Black and brown artists who didn't have Daft Punk-sized budgets, DJs that may have gotten their flowers in the underground, but are definitely at risk of being forgotten in successive waves of digitalism and cultural Coachella-fication. But when I think of Daft Punk I always think of Chicago house in the '90s, the pair's adulation of which was no secret. It's easy to equate Daft Punk with disco loops – like all good crate-diggers, as they aged they leaned heavily into exploring the lineage of where their samples had come from. NPR Music asked a few experts to consider what the two did for them personally, and what that might mean for the history books. Over the next 10 years – most notably with Discovery in 2001, a legacy-cementing tour in 2007 and the mystique-enhancing break they left in-between (not to mention all that came after) – Bangalter and Homem-Christo became the steel-and-silicon giants they'd wished themselves into being, while unwittingly setting the stage for a different type of machine altogether.ĭaft Punk's music is and always will be formidable, but the roots and future of its legacy aren't yet crystal clear. The pair, born Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, began making music in the early '90s, raving through that effervescent decade and leaving it, with the release of Homework in 1997, in a blissed-neon glow. On Monday, the ur-French-dance-music duo Daft Punk announced – via the slick and typically cryptic video above, featuring a dramatic self-destruct sequence – that it was hanging up the helmets and leather jackets for good.

Im blue daft punk