Daft Punk may be many things to many people. not least themselves, but what they aren’t are stupid. The French superstar EDM duo could wander around any Festival in the world with impunity and without the slightest chance of being recognized because they wear costumes. Smart. They got Moroder and Paul Williams to help out on their current Random Access Memories. Smart. And then they got Niles Rodgers to add the purely excellent guitar lick to “Get Lucky” and built their biggest hit ever around it. Smarter still.
Smartest of all?
They remixed “Get Lucky” into a ten minute extravaganza without actually taking anything at all away from their masterpiece and adding more more more Niles. It is, in some ways, the simplest of remixes: all it really does is elongate the song and really, what more do we want them to do? I could listen to that guitar line all day long and I am sure a million disco cover bands have it down by now and Holy Ghost! are figuring out how to incorporate it into a new song as we speak.
Given the ifiness of much of the rest of the album, “Get Lucky” is especially sweet. It is proof as to how difficult it is to make a smash hit song of such greatness, even Daft Punk can’t do it and nothing else, even the good stuff, on Random Access Memories, manages it. On their remix, Daft Punk chop up the vocals and recast em with vocoders and loops, etc. But really, it amounts to window dressing. What you really get is ten minutes of Niles instead of 5. Any questions?
Grade: A