Daft Punk blows up Vegoose!

This past weekend Kate and myself went to Vegoose 2007 (here in Vegas of course) and it was Daft Punktastic! I've liked Daft Punk since I first saw their video Around The World on MTV's 120 Minutes years ago when MTV still played music videos (reality shows killed the music video stars as the Buggles would sing). Well nothing prepared me for how awesome Daft Punk would be live and as they got on stage, I was as the kids say, "out of my mind" when the first electronic note and visual onslaught began!

Daft Punk is a two man French techno band (Guy-Manuel de Homen-Christo and Thomas Bangalter), in the fine spirit of the German pioneer techno band, Kraftwerk. They've been recording since 1993 and 2003 saw Daft Punk in an excellent anime called Interstella 5555, which used the music from their 2001 release, Discovery (actually the whole movie is just anime and Daft Punk music - no talking). They'll release a live album called Alive, November 19th of this year. One of their songs on Discovery is called Superheroes, so I feel justified in talking about Daft Punk on my Ich Liebe Comics! blog !

Anyway, Daft Punk was the closing band on the first night of Vegoose and it's a good thing they were because I don't see how anyone could follow their performance. As the curtain was raised they played a few of the musical notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (one of my all time favorite movies) so I knew they could do no wrong the rest of their set! Then the lights came on and Daft Punk (in their robot helmets, perched in the middle of this glowing, pulsating pyramid) launched into Human Robot. I don't think I've ever bopped my white boy ass off as hard as I did during Daft Punk's set - thanks France!

The photo above is of one of the three stages used and if you look really really closely you can see Michael Franti & Spearhead, who put on an excellent reggae set Sunday afternoon.
Kate, with one of the best costumes I saw all weekend, a guy who was calling himself Tyrannosaurus Sex. More people dressed up on Saturday than Sunday, but there were a lot of good costumes both days. Right away when we got to Vegoose Saturday afternoon I knew it was going to be a good time because there was a great vibe in the air (or was that the abundance of marijuana - actually even those who weren't smoking probably got high by proxy)!
Even one of the Green Lantern Corps managed to break away from the Sinestro Corps war going on in the DC universe to attend Vegoose!


Besides the uber excellent Daft Punk show, other acts I enjoyed playing Vegoose were: Blonde Redhead (whom I hadn't heard before, but they put on a great show - they've got a bit of a Sonic Youth sound going on), STS9 (another band I hadn't heard before - they had a cool techno, jazz, hip-hop sound), Queens of the Stone Age (just a great rock it hard band whom we've seen before), Michael Franti & Spearhead (got my reggae on with this band), Muse (another hard rocking band, and their drummer was wearing a Spider-Man costume - the one from the movies, in which his mask hardly stays on), and some little mellow band called Rage Against The Machine that closed Vegoose Sunday night. Rage Against The Machine was the band that definitely brought the people out to Vegoose (as well attended as Daft Punk was Saturday night and the other acts like Public Enemy and Cypress Hill, I'd say it was Rage that was most attendees main reason for coming). And Rage Against The Machine gave the people what they came for, a high energy show with their politically charged lyrics that had the audience head banging and dancing - if that energy could be harnessed, our political landscape would be very different from what presently exists (sorry for the digression). Rage Against The Machine is one of Kate's favorite bands and they definitely delivered what she was hoping for (Kate's also the bigger Queens of the Stone Age fan between us, but I enjoy them also).

So overall I'd give Vegoose 2007 an A+! Besides the great sounds, everyone there was having a great time (well actually we did witness a couple of people that had too much fun with alcohol), the weather was great, good mix of vendors, and they even had vegetarian food (curry and Thai food). I'd heard that last year's Vegoose "only" had 15,000 people and that they needed to have more than that this year or Vegoose wouldn't be coming back. Well I don't know what the official numbers were for this year's Vegoose yet, but it looked really well attended to us (actually if there would have been too many more people, we think it would have been somewhat uncomfortable and could have been a real logistic problem), so I'm encouraged that there'll be a Vegoose 2008 (bring on Kraftwerk and Bjork to make it a dream ticket for me!).

Daft Punk has left this blog!