Daft Punk and Wagner May Have More In Common Than You'd Think

I love finding redeeming qualities in popular music. Most of it is such trash, that I am extremely encouraged when I find what I consider to be a great pop song. Recently I stumbled across one, completely not expecting it. Over winter break, I found myself driving in my car, alone, listening to the Daft Punk that I added to my iPod. I know Daft Punk is a pretty popular group, definitely trendy, and I respect their music. I think it takes a lot of talent to do what they do. But I always thought of it as fairly mindless dance music. People aren't really listening to the music for meaning; it functions more as background music.


However, then Digital Love came on. At first I thought, "ok, this is a nice little love song," but as the song progressed, I found myself becoming more and more upset by it. The lyrics start out fairly happy as the narrator describes a romance he has in a dream. But, "before I knew it, the dream was all gone." He then goes on to sing about how he wants to make the dream come true. Sad, but not exactly heartbreaking. It's not like Daft Punk is the first group to ever write a sad love song. As an amateur singer/songwriter, I can tell you, I've written a number of sad love songs, and none of them are all that powerful. As the song continued, I found myself very captivated by it. It left me feeling very tense. Before I break down why I found the song to be so powerful, listen to the song for yourself.





Good stuff. In the past week or two, I've asked a number of people if they've heard the song, and if so, what they thought about it. A number of people have said they like the tune, though they couldn't explain why, and I even got one person who said it's fairly generic and mediocre. So I, with the help of a couple of my roommates, decided to analyze the song and break down why it left me feeling the way it did from a musical standpoint.


After listening to it again, in depth, I realized something that I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed before. The main theme never resolves to the I chord! To the non-musicians, what this means it that it never goes to the chord that you, as a listener, want it to. Pretty much every simple tune you can think of ends on the tonic (I chord). Of course never resolving to the tonic is going to leave the listener very tense! Listening to a 5 minute song and never getting the resolution that your ear is waiting for, leaves you very anxious.


So, why Wagner? Richard Wagner (pronounced vog-ner) was a 19th century German composer who is widely considered to be one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. I bring him up because he uses a similar, virtually the same, technique in his 1865 opera Tristan und Isolde. It is hailed as one of the greatest operas ever written and according to Wikipedia, "Many see Tristan as the beginning of the move away from conventional harmony and tonality and consider that it lays the groundwork for the direction of classical musical in the 20th century." In other words, the harmony was really groundbreaking and really weird. Coming from someone who took a course on 20th Century Classical Music, I can tell you that it got pretty out there in the 20th century.


What makes Tristan so strange/powerful? For almost the entire duration of the opera, just under 5 hours, it doesn't resolve to the I chord! At the climax of the piece, the very end, it finally resolves to the I chord, and it is said to be an unbelievably powerful experience. Just imagine as a listener, there's something that you want so badly, and are repeatedly being denied it. It leaves you tense and frustrated. And after almost five hours, you are finally rewarded with a triumphant I chord. It's extremely powerful.


Digital Love never resolves to the I chord. In fact, the way the song begins and ends is also brilliant. It opens with a synth suspended chord slowly fading in; not exactly dissonant, but unresolved. The song ends with the same synth chord. In essence, the symmetry of the identical beginning and end shows that the song hasn't really gone anywhere. The listener has ended up right back where they started. And this fits in perfectly with the theme of the song: an experience that turned out to be a dream and unreal. Nothing actually happened.


There are so many other great qualities about the song, as well. The "why don't you play the game?" vocal line, which is then mimiced by the synthesizer, is haunting. The whole song has a dreamlike quality to it too, which is a credit to the synth sounds being used, especially the synthesized vocals. But the lack of resolution is brilliant. It perfectly captures the emotion of the song.


So the next time you're listening to a popular song, don't be so quick to write it off as mindless. The techniques of great classical composers pop up every now and then in today's popular music. I knew that Daft Punk had talent just from listening to their live recordings. But they wildly exceeded my expectations with Digital Love. Every once in a while, a great popular song just may take you by surprise.