1. Just because it’s not the record you were expecting, it doesn’t make it a bad record.
2. Streaming Random Access Memories on iTunes probably wasn’t the best way to unveil it to the world. It meant that the most hugely anticipated album of the year received its first listen on millions of shitty little computer speakers.
3a. Streaming the most hugely anticipated album of the year anywhere probably isn’t a good idea. The amount you pay for something shapes your perception of it. Sitting at your desk with your arms (figuratively) folded, waiting to be impressed is no way to listen to a record.
3b. Sorry. I know I keep banging on about this, but in a world of infinite opportunities to listen to free music, you really try harder to understand a record when you pay for it.
4. At no point did Daft Punk tell you to expect an entire album of Get Luckys. You might realise this, but quite a lot of people seem not to.
5. If the old VHS tape found by Wall-E contained not Hello Dolly but Thank God It’s Friday or Saturday Night Fever and subsequently inspired him to make his own disco album, it might sound like Random Access Memories – especially Giorgio By Moroder, Within, Instant Crush and Touch.
6. Which is to say that it’s a love letter to the disco era, a sometimes poignant memorial to the unquenchable optimism of pre-Aids dance music – but not actually a disco album per se. Its closest companion is Madonna’s Confessions On A Dancefloor.
7. Dear People Who Seem Convinced That It’s All Been Done Before. Listen to Get Lucky. Then go back to your record collection and try and find a song that really sounds like it. I tried it the other week. I pulled out all of my Chic records. I pulled out Diana Ross’s Upside Down. I pulled out Sheila B. Devotion. None of them scratched the itch that Get Lucky scratched. The deep, foetal bass of Get Lucky couldn’t have been laid down in a pre-techno era. The gradual mutation of the vocal melody into robot-ecstasy – I haven’t heard that on any other record of the era. Ditto the absolute perfection of Omar Hakim’s prolonged drum climax on Georgio By Moroder (Omar Hakim’s drumming is 70 per cent of the reason I own Sting’s Bring On The Night album); the postcoitally ecstatic lack of BPMs on Lose Yourself To Dance (which will be beyond incredible when 200,000 people join in with the handclaps en masse at next year’s intevitable Glastonbury set); and the digitised intergalactic freakout at the end of Contact. I’ve got LOADS of old records. I spent ALL OF THE 80s buying up cheap disco 12-inches. I don’t have ANYTHING that truly sounds like this.
8. Dear Columbia: A much better way to disseminate Random Access Memories would have been a vinyl release, a week ahead of the official release. By and large, people who buy records on vinyl tend to devote more time getting to them. If you buy a record on vinyl, you can’t listen to it on shitty computer speakers (see point 2). And Random Access Memories needs to be heard either on good speakers or decent headphones to be really enjoyed. If the first fans hearing it this way had then gone onto social networking sites and relayed their reactions, all those first-reaction blogs might have been a bit more positive (by the way, you might want to keep this in mind for any other “event” releases you may be planning).