Daft Punk – Around the World
1997 · Directed by Michel Gondry
1.2M Likes
Best comments
1.“Remember, kids: this is your future if you get a university degree in modern dance.”
More comments
- 2.“For those who don't know: the skeletons are the guitar, the mummies are the drums, the aliens are the vocals, the dancing women are the keyboard, and the tall, small-headed guys are the bass.”
- 3.“How did the singer manage to memorize so many lyrics?!”
The story
Michel Gondry took a song that is basically its own title on repeat and turned it into a diagram you can dance to. Everything happens on a round stage built like a vinyl record, and each group of dancers is one instrument in the track. Four robots walk in a circle for the vocals. Four tall athletes in tracksuits, with tiny prosthetic heads, climb up and down stairs with the bassline. Four disco girls dressed as synchronized swimmers ride the high keyboard on another staircase. Skeletons are the guitar. Mummies are the drum machine.
Gondry said the stairs came from Chic's Good Times, a bassline that made him picture a little guy going up and down steps. Choreographer Blanca Li tightened up the routine he'd sketched, Florence Fontaine (the mother of his son) made the costumes, and his brother Olivier ran the flashing lights. It was Gondry's first try at organized dancing in a video, and it shows how he thinks: the music is the blueprint, the bodies are the parts.
The single went to number one on the US and UK dance charts and number five on the UK singles chart, and Pitchfork later ranked it 11th among the best songs of the 1990s. In 2017 a computer scientist named Colin Morris ran the numbers on 15,000 Billboard Hot 100 hits and found this one the most repetitive of the lot. Nobody minded. This is the remastered version Daft Punk posted in 2021.
