The first time I heard “One More Time” was a revelation. I was riding my Razor scooter around the driveway of my childhood home in Connecticut, some time in the summer of 2002 or 2003. I had brought the kitchen-bound Sony radio outside and tuned it to STAR 99.9, the local Top 40 station. After a long commercial break, the first song I heard that afternoon was something joyous, electric, euphoric, robotic— it gave me the sublime desire to belt the repetitive lyrics in exuberant rejoice.
I had never heard anything like it. It was something so, so different from the confines of even the most cerebral rock music I had heard my parents play on the stereo. It was something limitless in every dimension. On a musical level, my young brain subconsciously identified the infinite combinations and permutations of these robotic instruments from the future. On an emotional level, the feelings it inspired in me articulated something that became a common theme in my youth and adolescence — the desire to escape from my podunk town, where I had few friends and a tense life at home, and see the beauty of our incredible world. Hearing this song gave me a glimmer of hope that this was possible. Perhaps I would escape, one day.
Describing my experience, I recall the prologue to fellow Connecticut native Moby’s memoir Porcelain. He describes the experience of the first time he heard “Love Hangover” by Diana Ross, the moment he fell in love with electronic music:
“It represented a world I didn’t know, the opposite of where I was — and I hated where I was… There was more to life than this cold, deflated shopping mall. The seed had been planted and was gently encoded somewhere in my DNA. A disco song on AM radio had given me a glimmer of hope: Someday I would leave these dead suburbs and I would find a city where I could enter a womb. A disco womb where people would let me in and let me listen to their futuristic music. I imagined opening the doors to a disco at the top of the tallest building in the world and seeing a thousand people smiling at me and welcoming me inside.”
In retrospect, I was destined to enter that “disco womb” eventually. Through adolescence, I was directed to popular artists like deadmau5 and Skrillex during the advent of YouTube and Facebook. My music interests primarily lied in pop-punk and alternative hip hop, but my subtle predilection for the synthesizer and drum machine never went away. Of course, Discovery had been on the family desktop and, later, my iPod since that fateful day in the driveway.
Years later, while living in Los Angeles, the center of the electronic and dance music scene of North America, I became deeply enamored with and immersed in the scene. I had seen a thousand people smiling widely at me, welcoming a closeted, insecure, isolated and damaged kid from the suburbs of New York with open arms. I attribute much of my positive socialization and life philosophy to all the things I have heard, seen and felt through electronic music. As I listen to Alive 2007 on repeat today, I think of all that Daft Punk have done for music. I thank them, so dearly, for drawing me in to the limitless world of their creation that has given me so many friends and memories and so much joy and hope.
