(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes Singles: #01: Daft Punk - One More Time (2000)

Now that (t5!) has finished examining 99 singles that the zeroes should be remembered for, it’s tremendously sad that we’ve reached the end of the list, the final pages of the scrapbook, the closing beats of the decade. It’s probably pointless statement to say because of its obviousness, even corny, but I’ll say it anyway: because I tend to write these mini-essays in decreasing order (or increasing rank, I suppose), (t5!) has saved its best for last, singles wise. And, with all of this unhappiness (t5!) feels while all is being wrapped up, it seems incongruous that the last zeroes song this blog is going to talk about is drenched excessively in ecstasy: the number one song of the decade, “One More Time” by Daft Punk.

If you can believe it, (t5!)’s #1 wasn’t even good enough to be a Billboard #1, not even close. It climbed the summit of chartdom in France and in Canada, but the highest it ever reached in the US was #61 below sensations like Shaggy’s “Angel”, Matchbox Twenty’s “If You’re Gone” and Uncle Kracker’s “Follow Me”. 61! SIXTY-ONE!!! I would have loved to provide an exact clarification as to why that is, but I don’t have all the answers regrettably. Maybe the serious and sarcastic radio youngsters fresh off the ‘90’s were skeptical of the “irony” of adorable galactic house robots making cheesy French filter disco. Or maybe it’s a grower, taking more than a hundred listens before its genius revealed itself. Or maybe it’s as simple as the song being a testimony to the universal law that subjectivity rules in music listening, even in the zeroes.

As a personal testimony to subjectivism, I mentioned in the last blog post that OutKast is probably 1b and this 1a.The thing is I, in all likelihood, would say that “B.O.B.” is the “best” single of the zeroes, while “One More Time” is my “favorite” single of the zeroes. Normally I would preach how having a distinction between the best and your favorite is completely dumb, but I’ll my own words this time. The best way I can explain it: if I become a professor of pop music twenty years from now, and I would hold a lecture to reveal what the defining song of the decade is, I would spend fifty minutes dissecting Outkast’s “B.O.B.”; if somehow, twenty years from now, aliens invade the Earth, and these scary, little, laser-toting, intergalactic fascists compel every citizen that they can only own one song from each decade, I would pick “One More Time” in a heartbeat.

Prior to “One More Time”, Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel De Homem-Christo have been away from the public ear for almost four years. The time off doesn’t seem that long in retrospect—four years is, more or less, a standard break in between records—but after dropping a classic like Homework, which includes smashes like “Da Funk” and “Around The World” and “Revolution 909”, a four year break feels like an eternity. That’s why the intro, an ecstatically blissed-out fade-in of synth blasts and hi-hat clicks, sounds like such a homerun right off the bat. I don’t know whether this production stratagem was deliberate or not; but in the wake of a noiseless Daft Punk drought, kicking off their reemergence with this is victory.

The lyrics? It goes like this: “One more time/One more time, we’re gonna celebrate/oh yeah/alright/don’t stop the dancing.” Repeat. Rearrange. Repeat again. It’s not exactly the work of an artful poet yet its simplicity is almost spellbinding, mind-numbing even. It is dance music after all. Who has time to decipher cryptic verses when your dancing ape-shitly amidst flashing club lights? The singer Romanthony, soaked in auto-tune, sounds like a robot narcotized by purple pills—its motherboard is going haywire, its word bank is stuck in a loop, its sensors are flabbergasted by the bass thumps and slashing synths. Bear in mind, the auto-tune in 2000 was merely a novelty and no one would have expected its omnipresence in the later years of the decade. Daft Punk, in a way, started the trend and Romanthony, in a way, was the decade’s first autogoon.

Then, just when you thought you’ve settled into a groove, Daft Punk pulls the rug from under you. The 4/4 pounding is cut and you’re left puzzled as to what to do while beatless. The excessively long breakdown is a reward, though. Most dance songs reach their climax and then, that’s it, fall right back down to normalcy. But the break in “One More Time” flattens out at the top for 90 seconds, enabling you to savor the scenery at the peak of the song in slow motion. Likewise, it allows you to catch your breath, permits you to reenergize your partying stamina so that you can let loose with a 110% one. MORE. TIME!

As the last seconds of the zeroes ticked, it felt appropriate that “One More Time” soundtrack the countdown (and as big of a nerd as I am, I played this song over and over again in a New Year’s Party at our house). Released in 2000, the irresistible filtered-disco, the palpable danceability, and the gush of jubilation held up for almost ten years, and it’ll undoubtedly hold up for the upcoming ten years, and the ten years after that, and the ten years after that...