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50. Daft Punk, "Harder Better Faster Stronger" (Discovery, 2001)
Indie kids learn to dance blah blah blah. If I'd ever foreseen that Daft Punk's totally euphoric Discovery would ever be drafted into some kind of stupid trajectory about how the head-nod, arms-crossed, irony-laden crowd of the early '00s learned to dance and embrace pure joy and YOUTH VITALITY LOVE SEX, I probably never would've listened to it. I don't know when this became true, but at some point dancing became an ideological issue for a certain kind of under-30 cohort, the idea being that anyone who says they don't like to dance is either lying or afraid to embrace their true visceral impulses. You can like dance music without wanting to dance, and I don't care what Lady Gaga has to say on the subject. As the Rev. Jesse Jackson once said when speaking at my high school, "Some Negroes ain't got no rhythm." Let me substitute the most obviously contentious word in there: Some of us can't dance, and we'd appreciate it if you stopped telling us to stop being embarrassed and just be joyous. Also, on Halloween we don't feel like making costumes. Can we enjoy our drinks in peace now?

Anyway. Discovery is a pretty much universally beloved album for anyone who's heard it; this song is generally a consensus highlight, and I love it very much. There's very little I can do to describe its sonic qualities freshly: There's AutoTune distortion years before it was cool (everyone assumed it was vocoder, including me), and super-badass synth breakdowns, and it's all unstoppably propulsive. So I'll just explain how it works on me. For some reason, my freshman year of college I was saddled with a miserable crew of randomly assigned roommates: The psychopath who eventually tore a door off its hinges and was banned from housing, the stoners who stayed up 'til 5 am on shrooms and talked about the intelligence of dolphins, the rabidly Jewish guy who berated me for not being Jewish enough and practiced banjo in the small room's confines to play along with his favorite jam-band/Oasis riffs and giggled at his own farts. (A banjo, for those of you who've never gotten up close, is absurdly loud.) In the middle of this, I got into one of those ill-advised attempted bonding sessions, and somehow I put Discovery on and the usual idiot grin I get listening to it beamed across my face. "I've never seen you so happy," said one of the roomies, which is tribute to a) how oblivious they were to the misery they were inflicting on me and b) the power of the album to inflict joy on you when you're in the middle of an atrocious year. All I have to do is head-nod and grin; the other kids can dance. Continue Reading »