Photo by Mitch Feinberg
Sometimes it seems as if the mysterious French musical duo Daft Punk is nothing more than a pop culture fantasy. The two masked men (Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo) rarely grant extensive interviews; they spent years ensuring that their “real” faces were never photographed, though that’s become increasingly difficult in the internet age. For these reasons, it was a unique thrill when Whitewall sat down with an unmasked Bangalter at the sedately yuppie environs of Café Grumpy, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. What we found was a well-spoken, art-savvy intellectual who was comfortable discussing Pop Art, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, photographer Larry Clark, or the surrealism of Luis Bunuel. Daft Punk birthed a phenomena that grew from a whimsical premise—two grown men dressed as robots, playing machine music!—into an indie culture empire. For Bangalter, it’s a bit akin to what mainstream film icon George Lucas did with his Star Wars enterprise: “an artistic approach of starting [from] one person’s imagination and just [becoming] a global creative process that is obviously interlaced with the consumer society.”
“These personas, it’s like Wizard of Oz, it’s the little guy with the curtain,” Bangalter says. Join us as we step behind that curtain in Whitewall’s summer issue. Below, read part of the interview that didn’t make it into the magazine.
WHITEWALL: When you were first starting, did you already have a vision of being a global phenomenon? Or did that build over time?
THOMAS BANGALTER: We never had music in line of sight as a central thing; rather, it was the opposite way–it’s always been about creating things, and not really knowing what form would emerge as the main one.
WW: Do you give them equal weight—the albums, recordings, performances, and what you’d call the spectacle or the whole experience?
TB: Yeah. I don’t know how to say it in English—demarche which is probably the “approach” or the “process.” As an example in music, one of our favorites is Radiohead, and it goes way beyond the music of Radiohead. On the whole, they stand as probably our favorite based on their approach, whether it’s aesthetically, whether it’s ideologically.
WW: With a video like Andy Warhol’s “Sleep” or “The Empire State Building,”—do you think that was an attempt to see if people would appreciate it? Or was it almost some odd joke to say, “Let’s see who claims they love this…”
TB: I think it’s impossible to really say. But I think also it’s linked to maybe what was in Surrealism, where there’s a need for subversion. It’s the same as what I was saying about the stimulating escalation; I think to create scandal today–for an artist, it’s extremely hard. If you read Luis Buñuel’s memoirs, being kind of censored by the Governor of the region of France–it was crazy. An opportunity to be able to create such political scandal with a work of art is, I think, any artist’s dream.
WW: Do you think that’s still possible?
TB: I guess the society is allowing so much to be accepted or shown sometimes that it’s hard to. Maybe it’s not so graphical anymore, the scandal, in the way it used to be. Some recent Larry Clark films–I like them as movies but they seem to me less shocking than some of Todd Solondz’s films, that are way less graphical, but where the ideas that it explores, even on a completely verbal basis, are more deeply disturbing. So I think maybe censorship was based for a long time around [the] visual or the graphical nature of what you could show or not. Now we are immune to that, so maybe it goes deeper into disturbing ideas.
WW: Do you think there’s a threshold where, some year, artists won’t shock anybody anymore? We’re just used to everything?
TB: I wish not.
