Hype ting
When it's done right, hype is anticipation,
it's excitement, it’s organic.
But if you think about it, hype has become advertising
and publicity. Clever advertising and publicity, granted, but it’s become a
man-made phenomenon, something thought up in board rooms and offices and not
powered by the weight of public opinion (just look at the carefully orchestrated corporate 'Flash mobs' for evidence).
The film and music world have been
subjected to over-inflated opinion forming, with a steady stream of teasers,
trailers, innovative advertising and aggressive marketing causing consumers to
binge on carefully provided information which is then eagerly dissected by on air, online and print media. And when the excitement levels have
been built up to tantric levels and the album/film is released, you can almost guarantee box office receipts
and top of the pops results. But – and this is the crucial point – consumers
are nearly always left cold shouldered and disappointed, the hype almost never
living up to the content.
We’re not short of big-budget examples:
Prometheus and Man of Steel from the film world, and Daft Punk’s recent Random
Access Memories have all promised brave new worlds and failed to deliver.
In Daft Punk’s case, the Parisian robots
come with a natural weight of expectation – their first two albums helped shape
the current dance music climate, ushering in a new wave of bands and DJs, while
the 8 year gap between their 3rd and 4th album only
heightened the sense of occasion.
Sony cleverly tapped into that natural hype
and created a precise military-style campaign that started with targeted 15
second TV trailers (just 8 seconds of which consisted of music, and even then
it was just one chord progression), and ended with blanket advertising across
virtually every medium on earth (no, really).
Then came a series of in-depth Contributor
interviews, where Nile Rodgers, Pharrell and the rest all gave fawning
interviews in which they added further fuel to the fire, proclaiming the new
Daft Punk album to be the second coming (and we all know how that turned out,
Stone Roses fans). This was swiftly followed by a longer, 2 minute clip of ‘Get
Lucky’ debuted on huge screens at Coachella which promptly went viral quicker
than puppy in a onesie, and drew bigger cheers than festival headliners Blur.
This supremely limited content was enough
for Soundcloud warriors, however, who quickly drowned the internet in bad
re-edits, extended remixes and mashups, gaining millions of downloads and hits
within hours.
Next came the predictable interviews where
the ‘Da Funk’ duo proclaimed that the current state of dance music was in dire
straits (the insinuation being that their absence had caused it), and that
their album would be the antidote to the current rash of EDM sweeping the
world. By looking back to the classic disco sound of the 70s, they’d bring the
funk and soul back into dance music, giving us more than processed beats and
wasp-in-a-bottle basslines.
Finally, it was time for the journalists to
stoke the flames as part of their carefully guarded album play back sessions.
With a huge stereo primed with their fourth album, Daft Punk allowed some of
the world’s media into their world to listen to the album just once. NME, no
stranger to hype themselves, called it ‘the best party of the decade’, said
that the album left ‘the tatters of 21st
century dance music strewn around their robot feet, vanquished,’ while also commenting that it sounds like the ‘theme tune to a 70s
US sitcom.’
And therein lies the hype. Because nothing
should ever sound like a 70s US sitcom and receive praise, and especially not
when it’s been created by Daft Punk.
Yes, Sony’s marketing team have pulled off
an astonishing feat, propelling Daft Punk to countless records (their first
ever No.1 single, the most requested track on Pandora, the No.1 album in over 28 countries) and have
made the Guy-Man and Thomas Bangalter millions, and the record company
gazillions.
But in doing so, they’ve pulled the wool
over everyone’s eyes – the music fans bought the hype, pushing it through
carefully orchestrated social media outlets via the Daft Punk homepage. The
journalists bought the hype and gave it more column inches than any album or
event in living memory. And ultimately, the fans bought the hype, desperately
wanting this carefully woven story to be true. Taken alone, Daft Punk’s album
would probably have been seen as an ambitious failure, on a par with Human
After All.
But under the mountain of hype and
unsustainable pressure heaped on by layer and layer of expectation, it’s one of
the most disappointing albums in recent time. As Public Enemy wisely said, don’t
(always) believe the hype ::
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