great decision of the day is to look into daft punk interviews, and my two great finds are this article (seriously, just feast on that), and this one as well.

i just love this shit. "I think that music and any form of art means that people who are receiving things are putting the meaning to it much more than the meaning the people who create it can put into it. Except you put in into just something and then the perception of the people puts the meaning into it. Either there was no meaning in the first place or there was plenty of meaning. There is no logical link between the fact that at the end something completely meaningless might find a lot of meanings, or something that has lots of meanings in their meaning can seem completely pointless and meaningless, so the connection is just the one that connects us between the stuff how we appear and how people apprehend it and think it is."

that is some solid postmodern stuff. back in school when i was rambling on about telos and pynchon and relative, culturally-assigned meaning, this is the kind of stuff i was in love with. and this paragraph that bangalter spits out is something that someone of lesser talent and prestige would get slaughtered for by people calling "bullshit" the way kim kardashian gets slaughtered for things she says. but he's a genius so it means something.

but what i love about it is that they are turning out those unstoppable hits like "get lucky" that everyone loves. what i love about it is that only someone who believes in this "bullshit" could produce something like "get lucky". so even though most people mock the bullshit while they embrace the good beats, they are all secretly benefiting from and actually getting more happy because of postmodernism and the people doing postmodern lifting.

and today that just validated for me everything i believe in.

definitely also see here: sia. identity is the defining problem in postmodernism, and it's no mistake that both daft punk and sia both hide their faces; it's a very postmodern sentiment. anyway, so after several several several albums with different groups sia decides in 1997 to travel the world with her partner. they agree to meet in london and while her partner is there waiting for her, he dies in a car crash. after sia gets the news she hits the drugs and alcohol and this lasts for years, almost destroying her. slowly she begins to write songs and becomes behind-the-scenes famous for hits like "titanium", "wild one", and "diamonds".

the thing about songwriting these hits is the way she talks about it. i watched this interview on it and she talks about how she just gets these ideas for these songs by picking one thing, usually an object (titanium, diamonds, chandelier), and then just writing an entire song around it in like an hour. boom, done. then, though, comes the part where she sells a lot of them off because they're not true to her. she says something like, 'this is a fine song but i give it to someone else because my fans would never accept this shit from me, it's not me at all.'

next comes her immense fame and success and her own fear to even show her face and accept it because of her own struggle and weakness, so she wraps her identity and brand around this blonde wig, which she shares openly with other women, with lena dunham (a land-mine laying and stepping feminist in her own right) and kirsten wiig (a multi-talented but somewhat pigeon-holed woman very, very much nervous of and hesitant toward her own fame as well--i mean, she always snuck out the back of the rockefeller plaza after snl to avoid the crowds and won't take pictures with fans unless they promise not to post them on social media) and maddie ziegler (young up and coming, and now famous, dancer). her brand crosses in and out of and defies those identifying lines and she, as a person, is left to sort and keep her identity for herself.

and whether the public appreciates it or not ("nice try sia, we already know what your face looks like!! har de har"), she is doing something very important and brave in a time when a picture of you can go around the world five seconds after it's taken. and she's being a fucking artist at it, too, and we are all benefiting from it. the artists that can navigate that postmodern, whacked out space are the ones that are redefining how we dance, how we spend our summer nights, how we survive, how we grow, how we protect ourselves, and how we are shaping our own legacy.