Saturday, August 11, 2007

Robot rock

Back in March, we bought tickets for a little event in August: the infamous Daft Punk at Coney Island's Keyspan Park, the same venue that I saw Björk and Sigur Rós play years before I would move to New York in 2003

Daft Punk's catalog reigned over my raver years. You can't deny their influential pioneer status in electronic music. The night before tickets went on sale, a friend of a friend's described their show, which he caught in LA, as "a religious experience." When I awoke the next morning, Ticketmaster was the first stop and tickets would soon be in the mail.

Weeks before the event, pictures began to pop up. I saw some from Seattle on Pitchfork. A friend from San Francisco wowed me with cell phone snaps of the Berkeley performance. And three days ago, my best gal pal in Toronto dropped me a note to say that their stop in her city was "the BEST CONCERT EVER!!" and "holy sh*tballs."

There was hype. My hopes were high. But I was dubious. How awesome could Daft Punk's live how be?

Ridiculously so. There are no words. I am speechless (sort of.)

How cool do you have to be to dress up like a robot, step into a giant illuminated pyramid, perform for thousands of people and pull it off? And "pull it off" is an understatement. What I'm really trying to say here is "blow everyone's f*cking mind like it's never been blown before."

We got there kind of late and were unmotivated to fight our way up to the front so we snagged a spot to the right and warmed up with The Rapture. When Daft Punk started playing the whole place began to bounce.

The entire experience was a study in time travel. It felt like stepping back in time to 1997. They ran through many of my favorites including "Around the World", "One More Time", "Human After All", "The Prime Time of Your Life", "Robot Rock" and "Technologic" to name a few.

Y and I separated ourselves from the crowd to find room to dance and I eventually fought my way back into it in an effort to take some pictures that would give those of you out there in blog land some idea of the madness we experienced (impossible.) I somehow situated myself close to the front, center of the stage, where the sound was great and I could feel the bass in my throat but it wasn't as fun without my friends.

Overall, much like everyone I spoke to about this show beforehand, I had zero complaints and can easily say that it was one of the most amazing evenings of my life. So incredible in fact that it almost made up for the fact that I put in a twelve-hour day at work today (on a Friday.)

Note to self: Quit job and fine tune new life plan as a "Daft Head," following Daft Punk around on tour. Next stop: Las Vegas, October 27.

2 comments:

yer_bot said...

we need to some how keep this picture on the site FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unknown said...

nice one! except i'm surprised that you would still be dubious after my confirmation that it was the BEST CONCERT EVER. i mean, you should know by now that i'm hardly ever wrong! like seriously.

btw i was a few feet away from barging backstage (after having a few happy drinks) and seeing exactly what it was the Robots were doing. they could've been doing anything back there.. facebooking? playing scrabble? twisting knobs, mixing, playing on their keyboards? who knows? i wanted to watch. but one of my friends smartly stopped me from embarrassment. (i was gonna tell the security that i work at cnn)

anyway, wicked blog.. i'll see you in SEPTEMBER!!
yeah?