In their musical career, the French duo ‘Daft Punk’ has re-defined artist-fan relationship and many other social systems. In this post I wanna talk about their career as a classic example for the synergy of the concept of Produsage and Transmedia storytelling.
From the beginning daft punk have kept two things sacred - A. they separated their stage personas from their everyday lives. B. they encouraged fan participation, art and related projects.
We can see that from the beginning when the duo released an album, it released also a movie at the same time, related to the album. After their debut album "Homework" they had released the movie "D.A.F.T.: A Story about Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes" the movie was essentially a collection of the videos made for their songs in the original album by various artists.
Their second album, “Discovery” was released as a concept album. It was followed by a full feature length movie, “Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem”. The movie had magnificent Manga animation artwork and was supervised by their childhood hero, Leiji Matsumoto, a Japanese manga artist who was the creator of several anime and manga series in the 1970’s. The tracks from the Discovery album were originally designed to complement the scenes advancing the plot of the movie. The movie tells the story of the abduction and brainwashing of an interstellar pop group onto earth, and their rescue by the lead singer’s lover.
The first few thousand copies of the Discovery album included a “Daft Club" membership card. With this card the people who bought the album could access an online music service which featured remixed songs, a live 45 minute recording of Daft Punk performing at the Que Club in 1997 – that recording was later released as a separate album titled “Alive 1997”, and various versions of the all-time hit "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". The online service “Daft Club” ended in January 2003 and instead a remix album with the same title was released.
The Daft Club phenomena and the entire band’s attitude exemplify a totally different approach towards making music and relating to audiences. Instead of just a record Daft punk produce an immersive universe of videos, movies, webpages, remixes, live performance recordings and art made in different mediums that compensate each other to create an immersive experience for the listener/fan/user.
By 2003 Daft Punk already had a substantial network of fans who started producing, sharing and collaborating on projects and artwork related to the band. Many projects were produced and just to name a few:
The song “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” has been re-made, remixed and referenced to in hundred videos and fan made art, possibly more than any other work of art in the world. The first exciting remake was the famous Daft Hands that featured the hands of a girl dancing to the sounds of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” and showing the words to the camera. This video was followed by another video “Daft Bodies” – using very similar technique two girls performed the song, this time using their whole bodies. Interesting to note that at this first version of “Daft Bodies” the girls covered their faces obscuring their true identities – just like the original Daft Punk Duo, Also interesting to note that these girls were from Israel.
After “Daft Bodies” was released many videos imitating the original were launched. There was a 3D bodies video remake, an over masculine comeback (with gay undertones), a parody of the over masculine comeback, and a few pretty lame remakes of the remakes. The entire thing turned into somewhat of a phenomena reaching to at least 52 video in existence today of people remaking the original Daft Bodies dance. There’s even a version of the Simpsons doing it!
On the other hand, some people just danced to the song alone – this phenomenon started with the very talented Groovy Dancing Girl who made an impressive dance to the entire song. A remake of her dance was made by this little girl and even this guy to some extent.
More versions of the original song were released. Including an A capella version by an American musical group and a multitrack version by this dude from New Zealand. (I must add that the multitrack version is very similar to an earlier multitrack tribute to Star Wars that was very famous at the time). There was a version of a guy with a helmet who “gets into the daft punk universe”. And lastly there were some versions of people boomboxing the entire song, out of them important to note are this Asian and cool black guy.
The last phenomena I’d like to talk about is the idaft. It is an application that allows the user to hear the background music of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” and interact with the original song. The application is available also on iPad, iPhone and even as a level in the computer game “Half Life”. Also of course, there are people combining the idaft application with boomboxing.
The “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” song was remixed again and included in Kanye West's “stronger”. Both the song and the video were major success, which was the basis for further collaboration between Daft Punk and Kanye. in 2008 they made their first televised live performance in their career performing with Kanye in 50th Grammy awards Ceremony.
Interesting to note that Kanye's video Stronger includes many references, in style and in lyrics, to older media content from the 80's. I was specifically interested with the very blunt references to scenes from the Japanese anime cult movie "Akira". Especially what struck me as interesting was the remarkable similarities between the scene (minute 4:30) where the machine was diagnosing the protagonist "Tetsuo" in Akira and the entire "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" video where machines are diagnosing the band members.
The duo also participated in two commercials for Gap jeans, and for sony ericsson.
Lastly I want to sum up and say that Daft Punk exemplify through their career and approach to music making the concept of transmedia storytelling very well, and also by letting the fans produce, collaborate and share content and art they deffinitly helped form a collective network of knowledge and produsage.
The best example for all this would be the video of a live performance of the duo from 2007. the video is composed of shots from 250 audience members who attended the show and were part of the crowd. This in my opinion is the best example of Daft Punk's approach and fan-artist style of collaboration.
hope you enjoyed!
-Asaf Cohen
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