Of the unlocked extras, the synthetic croon of “Infinity Repeating” doesn’t quite make up the down payment on Casablancas’ pledge in 2014 of it being “super bizarre,” nor does it hit on the same level as the laser-guided lovesickness of “Instant Crush.” It just… is. “Prime,” however, comes correct with a high-noon epic that brings to mind the superabundance of disco pioneer John Morales’ reel-to-reel edits, or 1997’s Daftendirektour, where Daft Punk would break into a galloping cover of Moroder’s “Chase.” It’s a tantalizing glimpse at how an alternative RAM might have panned out with extra rocket fuel.
“The worst thing you could do for an album is release it,” Bangalter confided to TRON: Legacy’s orchestral arranger Joseph Trapanese. For RAM, however, market conditions could hardly have been sweeter. Both social media and the music press were at peak effectiveness as promotional vehicles, entire staff rooms marshaled to lavish attention upon this monument to midtempo.
Handily, an antagonist had also emerged. The dance sphere had become convulsed by a debate pitched between DJ traditionalists and the high-octane, low-subtlety new breed of EDM stars who brazenly pushed Daft Punk’s theatrical live template toward an event horizon. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo surely couldn’t have foreseen a wave of cake-throwing as the direct ramification of Alive 2006-07, yet it provided the perfect opening for these upstarts-turned-scene-elders to splash cold water in the face of a rapidly overheating scene.
Well, here’s the rub. RAM’s titanic popularity offered a roadmap to disposability, sparking a wave of cosplayers who gestured toward the album’s burnished chrome and instructed their labels that, if enough money was dumped down the hole, they too could attain a throwback vibe, man. Top 40 radio and festival bills alike became hopelessly bogged down with yawningly sterile business-class bops, a mid-2010s morass of Earth, Wind & Dire.
There’s still plenty to relish, but front to back, the songs on this set are not airtight enough to be impervious to time’s ebb and flow. The framing of RAM as an antidote to screen addiction has calcified into a Boomerist rind; today, the most compelling forms of expression do emanate from a laptop, and a decade’s worth of denuded disco and rich-guy funk simulacra has rendered plush melodies and scratchy licks of the ’70s bloodless. Human After All, which bludgeoned listeners for being supine in the face of a commodified future, strikes a positively relatable note by comparison.
Such is the curse of music as Fabergé egg. Where the visuals for Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You” and Discovery counterpart Interstella 5555 conclude with the dream of a child, RAM comes off like the high-spec dream of an adult. Which is fine if that’s your thing—and to be sure, it is a great many people’s thing—yet the most self-evidently perfect recording of the century can’t help but feel as if it’s best admired through a gold vitrine.
Random Access Memories was assembled to preach the credo of analog over digital, faces over interfaces. To electronic fans who were switched on by the generosity and million-volt charge generated between Homework and Alive 2007, the move suggests a different binary: that of abdication over affirmation. During the press junket for Mythologies earlier this year, Bangalter was eager to state that his communion with the machines was over. It’s not as if we couldn’t already tell.
Whether you love RAM the album, or loved the pomp, circumstance, and deserved celebration of Daft Punk that accompanied it, is to a degree immaterial. Several collaborators have said the group was comfortable in the face of possible rejection, which I don’t entirely buy, but if the very attempt of an Apollo-level moonshot was the goal, why fuss over sticking the landing. The residual memory we carry alongside the music is that of Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, ringed by friends, dangling their feet off the edge of pop culture’s Mount Rushmore, game finessed.
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