Review
Genre and Mood
Daft Punk ended their first album with Funk Ad, fifty-one seconds that belong to French house and electronic music because of what they are made from. It is playful and quirky by design: not a new song but a familiar one turned around, a wink at the listener who has just sat through more than seventy minutes of Homework.
Song Summary
Funk Ad is, in the plain words of the album’s history, a reversed clip of Da Funk, the single that first came out on Soma in 1995 and sits fourth on the album’s track list. The sources name nothing else in it: no new melody, no vocal, no new beat. The title reads like an advertisement for the song it reverses, and the track behaves like one, a short reminder of the record’s breakthrough single on the way out.
Musical Breakdown
Main Section
No source describes Funk Ad passage by passage, so this page describes less. What it is made from is documented: Da Funk, which Daft Punk built after weeks of listening to American G-funk, with a riff that started as a siren and a bassline programmed on a Roland TB-303. Played backwards, each sound arrives as its own tail and ends on its own attack.
Outro
The track is the outro of the whole album, sixteenth of sixteen, placed straight after Alive. It is over before it has settled, and Homework ends there.
Concepts in Focus
An alternate version is a second recording of a song by the same artist, and Funk Ad is about the most literal one possible: the same material, the other way round. Comparing it with Da Funk shows how much of a track’s character lives in the shape of each sound over time, and not only in its notes and rhythm.
It also does the work of an interlude, but at the end rather than in the middle. Homework opens with Daftendirekt and the twenty-eight-second WDPK 83.7 FM, and closes with this clip: short pieces that frame the long tracks between them.
The bassline of Da Funk came, by Thomas Bangalter’s account, from patterns he had already written on his TB-303: he and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo listened to them and took the one that fit best. Bangalter also said the melody and synthesizers recall Giorgio Moroder and electro. In Funk Ad all of it runs backwards.
Artistic Context
Homework was recorded between 1994 and 1996 at Daft House, the duo’s studio in Paris, produced by Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, mastered by Nilesh Patel at the Exchange in London, and released on 20 January 1997 by Virgin and Soma. Its other big single, Daft Punk – Around the World, comes three tracks after Da Funk.
Impact and Reception
Funk Ad was never reviewed on its own; it lives inside the reputation of Homework, which AllMusic’s Sean Cooper called “an almost certain classic” and Rolling Stone named the greatest EDM album in 2012, and of Da Funk, which Pitchfork placed 18th among the tracks of the 1990s. Listen to Da Funk first, then to these fifty-one seconds.
