Homework didn’t need associate itself with rock stars past or present to establish its credibility there’s no Noel Gallagher or Keith Flint present to give the group an identifiable mouthpiece, and the lone traditional rock figure name-checked in the inspired-by roll-call “Teachers” is the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. But once they embraced house music, they left their alt trappings behind, and Homework is a defiantly unrock album, almost entirely absent traditional analog instrumentation - “Da Funk” might have a riff to go ten rounds with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Loser” for the honor of the decade’s best, but actual guitars had little to do with its creation. They started out as a coldly received, guitar-based act in the early ’90s the phrase “Daft Punk” came from a negative review of one of their gigs in British indie rag Melody Maker.

The Robots were certainly no strangers to rock music. The Weeknd's 'Starboy,' Featuring Daft Punk, Hits No. And that’s in large part because when it came to dance’s ability to cross over to rock fans, Thomas and Guy-Manuel were the only ones to take the long view. But in retrospect, what really separates Daft Punk from the rest of the electronic Class of ’97 is that unlike their peers - nearly all of whom peaked in popularity in the back half of the ’90s - they outgrew their era exponentially. They were French, not British, and much more rooted in traditional house than most of their contemporaries, many of whom had started to integrate jungle breakbeats and IDM unpredictability into their soundscapes, along with hip-hop grooves and rock bombast. With alternative rock fading in cultural prominence, due to the radio dilution of grunge and the dissolution of many of the genre’s marquee bands, it seemed like these dance acts were primed for a cultural takeover.ĭaft Punk was connected to this moment - “Da Funk” appeared alongside Underworld and Moby on the star-studded soundtrack to 1997’s The Saint, and the duo’s boundlessly imaginative music videos played in rotation on MTV’s AMP next to clips from Orbital and The Crystal Method - but they weren’t really part of it.

acts like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, fashioned electronic music into something that could soundtrack X Games montages. Moreover, it was a very aggro time in mainstream dance music in general: The big beat invasion, heralded for years on the momentum of increasingly popular block-rocking singles by U.K.

Daft Punk’s early singles - and the duo has since admitted that Homework was essentially a glorified singles compilation - were mostly in this pulverizing mold, particularly their international breakthrough hit, “Da Funk,” a stomping disco rager with a growling, instrumentally ambiguous riff that proved one of the decade’s most inflammable hooks. Of course, at the time, the album made total sense.

Daft punk songs 90s