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Wednesday, February 11
Yer All Daft
An introduction to the "Daft" viral world, for those of you left out. Daft Punk is an electronic music band that has been around since the early 90s (most famous in the U.S. for the songs "Around the World" in 1997 and "One More Time" in 2001). Also included on the 2001 album was a song called "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," which most of the U.S. missed. It was re-released as a live version in 2007 (where I found it on iTunes) and subsequently bastardized into a hip-hop song by one of the numerous rappers I can't tell apart (where it saw wider U.S. airplay, so if you heard that version first . . . I'm sorry).
The "Daft" viral videos took off in mid-2007, beginning with the original "Daft Hands." The videos are an example of musical kinesthesiology, of a sort; the motions of the performers create the lyrics of the song, and as the lyrics speed up, the performers speed up into more intricate patterns. This works because the song has a grand total of 19 words, and several of them share most of their letters (our/hour, ever/never) which lowers the total number of letters required even further.
"Daft Hands" was the original and most popular (with something like 28 million YouTube views). It spawned dozens of "hands" copies (all of these start slow, by the way; the impressive choreography isn't until later in the song).
It was followed about four months later by "Daft Bodies," which featured two women with silver boxes on their heads (which were later parodied in numerous other viral videos). A plethora of other "bodies" videos appeared not long after.
The next step, of course, was multiple people. A rugby team did a presentation of it and posted it online, followed by a student council somewhere (which has my favorite choreography):
I find the interplay of music and motion and the translation of motion into music an interesting subject and I think this is a good example of it. I'd have done a choreography like this in school as a presentation.
