Look, “Robot Rock” isn’t the greatest Daft Punk song (too repetitive, not squirmy or joyful enough), and its video can’t top most of the classics found on this list. –Philip Sherburne “Something About Us” (2003) A tongue-in-cheek tale of farm-to-table to rave, it’s a precursor of all the ways Daft Punk would find to play with loops over the next couple of decades. Cue the déjà vu-like coda of cops busting ravers-except this time, the policeman notices the red splotch on his shirt, giving the young woman the chance to beat a hasty retreat. Cooking-show subtitles accompany the motions of a white-haired woman making pasta sauce in her kitchen her Tupperware of spaghetti ends up in the hands of a cop eating in his car. The video initially seems intent to simply reconstruct that same scene-but then a blood-red stain on a policeman’s shirt collar opens the trap door to an unexpected narrative digression of Charlie Kaufman-like proportions, taking us from the first green shoots of a sprouting tomato plant through B-roll of picking, sorting, shipping, and shopping. On record, it begins with the muted sounds of a crowded party, heard as if from outside the venue, followed by police sirens, a stern warning to disperse, and screams as the rave collapses into a raid, a well-timed filter sweep plunges us directly into the midst of a throbbing dancefloor, and the music begins in earnest.
Like how a telephone ringing in the next room might influence the direction of a dream, the video takes essential cues from the song’s curious mise-en-scène. It was fruitful in other ways, too, precipitating another collaboration between Gondry and Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter in their unforgettable video for side project Stardust’s “ Music Sounds Better With You,” as well as influencing LCD Soundsystem’s “ Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” video eight years later. With its five groups of costumed dancers-including skeletons, mummies, and in a sign of tricks to come, robots-in front of bright lights, each moving in tandem with an element of the music, the video showed that the future could be cute, funny, and campy all at once. Daft Punk’s “Around the World,” directed by Michel Gondry as he was coming into the peak of his powers, looked and sounded like something else altogether. The Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers struck first in 1996 with their videos for “ Firestarter” and “ Setting Sun,” suggesting that the future might be a bit like ’70s punk or ’60s psychedelia. By 1997, the American music industry had decided that something called “electronica” was going to be the future, and MTV viewers were presented with a dizzying array of options for how that future might look.
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