Human After All

The title track of *Human After All* is Daft Punk at their most abrasive and least loved, and time has treated it better than the 2005 reviews did. Built on a single distorted guitar-like riff cycling with almost no variation for five minutes, over a hard four-four kick and a vocoded voice repeating the title phrase, it is deliberately impoverished — the duo made the album in six weeks and let the constraint show. The emotional landscape is claustrophobic and mechanical, industrial rather than euphoric, closer to Big Black or early Ministry than to the disco warmth of *Discovery*. The vocoder does something specific here: a machine insisting on its humanity, the phrase repeated so many times it curdles from statement into malfunction. That's the album's whole argument — technology and flesh collapsing into each other, robots pleading their case. Contemporary listeners wanted another *One More Time* and got a locked groove and a headache; the record was later reappraised as the sound of two people making a point about mass production by mass-producing. Best experienced very loud, in a room, when you want music that grinds rather than lifts — or as the setup for the *Alive 2007* mashups, where these dry parts finally found the bodies they were missing.