25 April 2013
When I moved to Paris in early 2005, I expected my music-writing hustle for the folks back home to feature mostly Daft Punk, Air and other internationally-renowned notables of “le French touch”. This did not turn out to be the case. For one thing, Daft Punk and Air were of little interest to the French mainstream public and media, who still preferred earnest chanson française to fashionable indietronica. It didn’t help that during my Paris years neither act released anything decent; Daft Punk’s underwhelming 2005 album Human After All set the tone there. On the ground, rap en français chronicling life in the disadvantaged banlieues was where French music was developing its vital new sounds and voices. Eventually, my Paris music writing centred on trying to convince a suspicious Irish readership (and weary Irish editor) of the existence of music festivals that actually had excellent nearby public transport links, and of credible French bands calling themselves things like Pony Pony Run Run.
Then in April 2013, just as I had packed my boxes to move back home at last, Daft Punk went to number one in Ireland, right after an English band called Bastille. ‘Get Lucky’ made them the first French act to top the Irish singles chart since Modjo with ‘Lady’ in 2000, five years before I moved to Paris. Basically, my whole Paris music-writing period had been a waste, though thankfully I’m not bitter. Since then I’ve resolved to write only about lucrative and respectable topics like Westlife and ‘Aon Focal Eile’.
Suffice it to say, we’re not getting Daft Punk at their innovative, idiosyncratic peak here. The snatches of their signature vocoder vocals and electronica beats in ‘Get Lucky’ are incidental flourishes, catchphrases thrown to the gallery, hardly essential to the operation. You really could take the Daft Punk content out of this and not miss much.
Something actually missing from ‘Get Lucky’ is a billing for one of the prominent performers here. Indeed, I had to double-check and it’s true; on the original release Nile Rodgers’s name isn’t above the title as a featured artist, and he doesn’t get credited with an official Irish chart place for this single. By 2013 his renaissance was almost complete; his presence was the major attraction of ‘Get Lucky’ for me and, I reckon, a lot of people. Alas, Rodgers seems to have been hired here just for perfunctory Chic-flavoured rhythm-guitar riffing: pleasant and enjoyable, but why bother listening to him phone it in on ‘Get Lucky’ when he does this so much better on his own fabulous classic records?
And so we come to the other billed artist and the third big name on ‘Get Lucky’. The best of Pharrell’s work to date had combined breathlessly cool and fresh R&B-pop minimalism with an almost comical male randiness that too often degenerated into crass ’00s sexism; the video for his 2003 debut solo single ‘Frontin” features 30-year-old Pharrell with a love interest who was 17, while song and video for ‘She Wants To Move’ by N.E.R.D. are about one possessive male taking a woman away from another. On ‘Get Lucky’, Pharrell falls in with the blandness of the brief; while his vocals are sweet, the lyrics are a vapid Instagram feed of new age inspiration and party-hardy whoop-holler. It paid off, though, and the Irish charts were now about to enter an unexpected Pharrell Era; during the subsequent year he’ll spend a whopping 22 weeks at number one.
‘Get Lucky’ contains the harbinger of a Pharrell chart-topper to come – our very next Irish number one, in fact. Here, his chorus includes a familiar dip into male horniness: “I’m up all night to get some”. That next chart-topping single also looks to get some. Instead, everyone involved gets a whole lot more than they bargained for.
