Portrait

Daft Punk are what I call maestros. I’ve finally bought their Alive 2007 tour album, and I’ve been listening to it diligently over the last week. And it only goes to prove what I’ve always known about the duo: that they’re masters of their craft. Listening to Alive 2007 is spiritual for any long-time fan of Daft Punk. It’s like a dream come true. It’s the ideal, un-cheesy Best Of album, done with a sophistication and skill that other Best Of collections often lack. It’s their entire career’s best work, placed together in an artistically wholesome way. And for fans, it’s a way to somehow gain access to perhaps one of the decades best live tours. One of the decades best parties.

Because that’s what Alive 2007 seems to have been. Not a concert, but rather one awesome party, Daft Punk are but a speck onstage, in their robot suits, surrounded by colour, light and technology. They are not the cynosure. Instead, everything has been carefully set up to highlight the music, and increase the intensity of the mood of the party-goers present. They are non-entities. They are just the ones pressing the buttons. Alive 2007 wasn’t about two people. They made sure of that. It was about the sea of people that had come to rock.

They also have refused to release a DVD of the tour, saying that the various clips on YouTube are the greatest reward for them. Indeed, they have chosen wisely as always, wishing to put themselves in the background, and leaving the music to be the centre of attention. No images or clips could have done justice to what was this great event. And perhaps it is better not to even try.

The album itself is seamless and perfect. Tracks aren’t merely lined up and played one after the other. Their most famous tracks are cleverly mixed together in a way that has you wondering how they were ever two separate songs to begin with; the master mixing and added music make it seem so natural that they be played simultaneously. The intensity builds with each song, starting with the giant of true musical achievement Robot Rock, where the voices saying ‘Human’ and ‘Robot’ battle it out. This sets a tone that is familiar to fans: the underlying theme of possibly all of Daft Punk’s music, the premonition of a technology-heavy future, the constant question of whether electronic bleeps are the way forward in music. The flawless mix of Around the World and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger seems the first real climax of the album, with pumping bass that must have had the thousands gathered jumping in perfect unison. Although many new musical elements have been introduced to surprise and tease, such as with Technologic, they also know where to leave classics alone, such as with Burnin’. Another track that makes two tracks seem as though they were meant to be one is their classic mixing of club favourite One More Time and Aerodynamic. The album peaks and continues to peak when you think it can’t take you any higher, and then ends with a glorious encore set of Human After All/ Together/ One More Time/ Music Sounds Better with You. Cheekily, they reprise the song perfect for reprise: One More Time.

The wonderful thing about this album is that it’s both great fun and musical genius simultaneously. You can sit and listen to it intensely, or you can party to it without having to worry about anything: Daft Punk has a journey planned for you that is best not messed with.

Just when everyone started to think they were dying, they did the years’ best come-back and proved that they are very much Alive. Paving the way for the music of the future, and holding their ground in a world where electronic music is constantly being re-defined, they were there to show that they are still at the top, and still wonderfully good at what they do.

The wonderful thing about Daft Punk is their inherent ability to make their songs, some of which are more than 10 years old, the music of the future. And this is what Alive 2007 was ultimately about: showing that the traditional can still sound good and can continue to sound good forever more.

Alive 2007 can stand as a great lesson for DJs and electronic musicians everywhere: that you can take the old, and constantly change it. That with the skill and the technology at hand, you can play one song in a thousand different ways, that each time you play it, you can own it. That you can play a song that is more than a decade old, and have people feel as though they have never heard it before: the fine skill it takes to perfectly merge the familiar with the new.

The world of electronic music has changed the way it sounds drastically since Homework in 1997; we are no longer restricted to the classic high hat/bass sound of House. The world has moved on, but Daft Punk is not being left behind. Instead they are leading the revolution of traditional House music. Ultimately, what Daft Punk did with Alive 2007, was prove that old-school House music can still sound incredibly cool.

galapita healing garden

as we head to buttala on the kataragama road, it is clear that nature is a main victim of this war. we drive past miles and miles of devastation; where the jungle has been chopped, burned, bulldozered and cleared on either side of the road for hundreds of meters in. we are stopped by several checkpoints. they say that it’s a security measure taken by the armed forces to prevent the tigers from hiding in the jungle. the explosion recently in buttala has triggered this reaction. every hundred yards or so there is a lone soldier posted inside a barricaded hut; boiling in the sun, all by himself. they do not leave their posts. they cannot. they stand, lonely, bored. young boys, with nothing to their protection but some barbed wire. is this what they signed up for, i wonder. how many species of birds and insects have been displaced by the destruction, i wonder. but maybe this is the price we must pay.

when we ask them who they suspect for the bombings, they confidently parrot that it was the LTTE. they have no evidence, no proof. they are trained for a mere three weeks before they’re chucked in the middle of nowhere to stand guard outside a thick jungle, and then, to destroy it. just young boys. aching for conversation. for some kindness.

we drive into galapita, a beautiful piece of land on the banks of the river, right in the middle of the jungle. there is zero connectivity, no electricity. the buildings are of clay walls and thatched roofs; they barely have walls. we are so far from home. so far from anything we know. the days we spend there are magical. we swim in the river, eat from clay pots, and listen to the birds. we are amidst nature at its most untouched. we sleep at night surrounded by the whispering of the trees and the rushing of the river. we awake at dawn to the call of the peacocks. we swim in the chilly, clean water; and dry ourselves on the steaming rocks. we lie, moon-bathing the night before poya, as we revel in the glory of a near full moon. it is as though the light itself has pushed the clouds away, for although the days before have been overcast, come monday night, we have a crystal clear vision of the moon and the stars. it is like someone has turned on a tube light.

and yet, i think, to build this place, there must have trees cut. more birds displaced. maybe nothing in the world is absolutely pure.

what we manage to forget, we are reminded of again on our drive back. whatever we fought hard to leave behind; the knowledge of the war, the pain, the loneliness, the mindless destruction; we must once again pick up, as we are stopped by checkpoints, as we pass miles of what used to be jungle, as we pass lonely young boys, in camouflage outfits, watching, waiting.

how many lives will it claim, wild and tame, before it has run its course?

the villa, galapita

everyday, i delete at least 30 friend requests on facebook. because i don’t know a single one of them.

really, who are these people? does it happen everywhere in the world, where random strangers have nothing better to do than sit and add you on to their friend lists?

every day, at least 30. i am really curious. who are they? why do they do it? it baffles me. it truly does.

I realize that publishing this so soon after my attack on Sarah Palin will make me seem undoubtedly anti-American. Please note that it is not deliberate, and I wished to publish this because I agree wholeheartedly with Pullman’s views regarding banning things, especially things like books and films. It just so happens that it’s the American Library Association that has banned Northern Lights.

———————————————————————————————————————————-

“When I heard that my novel The Golden Compass (the name in the USA of Northern Lights) appeared in the top five of the American Library Association’s list of 2007’s most challenged books, my immediate and ignoble response was glee. Firstly, I had obviously annoyed a lot of censorious people, and secondly, any ban would provoke interested readers to move from the library, where they couldn’t get hold of my novel, to the bookshops, where they could. That, after all, was exactly what happened when a group called the Catholic League decided to object to the film of The Golden Compass when it was released at the end of last year. The box office suffered, but the book sales went up – a long way up, to my gratification.

Because they never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something – book, film, play, pop song, whatever – is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone. Why don’t the censors realise this?

In the case of The Golden Compass, the reason the book was challenged is listed as “Religious Viewpoint”, a reason that appears in connection with only one other book in the top five, a picture book called And Tango Makes Three. This is based on the true story of a pair of male penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo, who for a time formed a couple and hatched the egg of a mixed-sex couple who were unable to hatch two at once. This, if you can believe it, was challenged for six different reasons: “Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group.”

Religious Viewpoint? Penguins?

I hope the authors have done very well out of the increased sales they’ll have enjoyed, but this kind of thing only invites the rest of the world to consider the American public demented.

In fact, when it comes to banning books, religion is the worst reason of the lot. Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones.

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn’t true; I like plenty of things that aren’t true. It’s that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”

- From the Guardian