Daft Punk — sacred cows getting slaughtered.
[Video][Website]
[4.60]
Thomas Inskeep: What is this? According to my reading it’s a prime example of the next-hot-UK-dance-genre, bassline, but what I mainly hear is a, well, bass line along with a bunch of chopped-up vocal samples from Daft Punk’s “Technologic” via Busta Rhymes’s “Touch It” (ergo its title, get it?). It’s all under two-and-a-half minutes long and is oddly, compellingly listenable, complete with a filthily suggestive video. I may not understand it.
[6]
Mark Sinker: The hook itself isn’t much more than a semitone rise to the phrase “turn it” and an accented drop onto the word “babe”, plus the artful relooping of six or seven two-or-three word phrases to unequal lengths so that rise and drop fall at different places in successive bars, as an asymmetric two-note pedal point for the various bass blorps and hisses to work against. And the quasi-asymmetry feels pleasantly unpredictable, though it’s actually pretty straightforward when you take care to count and think it out. In longer sets, the voicing is sometimes varispeeded to code male rather than female — depending I guess on the mood of the place and the DJ. Once you’ve heard it being woven into these longer sets (and in and out of all Hannah W’s two dozen other devices and voice-fragments), it’s maybe a bit less exciting just to find yourself looping this single song yourself, the same every time despite its intricate structure.
[7]
Anthony Easton: Daft Punk’s anthem for the remix generation is reclaimed by a pounding bassline and an idea that an old idea becoming refurbed can be sexy, like chrome on an old hitch.
[4]
Micha Cavaseno: For all the people who missed when Swizz Beats turned the same Daft Punk bit into something people actually danced to, and who just got out of the drug coma and are unaware that Electro-Clash is over. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go listen to Miss Kittin’s “Frank Sinatra” and enjoy life a bit more than these two.
[3]
Will Adams: This just in: crappy bootleg remixes of Daft Punk now eligible for major label representation. Aspiring bedroom producers, your time has come.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: Points for shooting the sacred cow of Daft Punk and dancing on its corpse, and for a few listens it has a hypnotic, exhausting quality.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: It’s a little embarrassing saying this, because we all like to think of ourselves as having good taste, but I like a great deal of objectively awful EDM. Sometimes it’s explainable enough: brostep is scaled to fill entire fields, bad dance remixes loop compulsively forever — which happen to be the two main traits of feelings that want sublimation. But what of “Rhymes,” as astringent in feeling as its Daft Punk source material and as creatively bankrupt as a 2015 track whose source material is Daft Punk? It’s joyless, or maybe more accurately ruthless — ruthlessly obvious sample, ruthlessly efficient forward push; it works on my brain like a VHS cleaner tape. Maybe you can dance to it, but what you can do even better is focus.
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: Why does “Barbra Streisand” continue to sound vital, while this feels like a colourless variation of Trigger’s broom? Why does it feel apt to call this “lazy” when more effort may well have gone into it than many more traditional covers, and effort is obviously irrelevant? Perhaps, like Friend Within’s take – as in theft – of “Renegade Master,” it may be better enjoyed by those unfamiliar with its source.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: Well, this reminded me how much better Daft Punk’s “Technologic” is removed from the context of an iPod ad, so that’s cool.
[4]
Alfred Soto: What Hannah wants Chris gets.
[3]