There was palpable anxiety among artists and record labels that music was now more ephemeral than ever.

On social media, album cycles were also shrinking - the days when a big-tent record might dominate the conversation for more than a week or even a handful of days were long gone. The industry expectation that listeners would pay for digital downloads was dwindling as album sales sank to new lows. Pandora was almost three times as popular, and piracy was still a viable alternative for freeloaders. Spotify was around, but it only had about 24 million subscribers. This was a year when we were all just getting used to the ways in which music is currently distributed, consumed, and discussed. To understand why that is, we need to pull back for a wider view of the musical landscape of 2013. In this instance, if you still put “Get Lucky” on your backyard barbecue playlists, there are plenty of individuals - second-guessing music critics, snarky Twitter commenters, those pesky “dance-music purists” - who are prepared to tell you that your taste is butt. This is why any marginally popular or acclaimed cultural artifact can be credibly labeled “overrated” in the social media era, as it has likely inspired discourse that many of us find to be annoying.Ĭonversely, when something you like is called overrated, it can feel like a personal attack, because that’s basically what it is. It is an expression of misanthropy toward opinions held by strangers. Because calling something overrated is not really about the art, it’s about how other people are talking about the art. So, why is Random Access Memories, of all the prestige records that have come out in the past decade, frequently singled out as “overrated”? And is it actually overrated?īefore I answer those questions, I should concede an obvious point: Talking about art in terms of whether it’s “overrated” can be reductive and kind of stupid. Usually, we are happy if the music bangs and the lyrics are quotable (or at least are not embarrassing). But most of the time we do not punish artists for not producing another Kid A or To Pimp A Butterfly. With all due respect to Pitchfork: 99.9 percent of albums, even the great ones, do not “push pop music forward” in any meaningful way. “It didn’t push pop music forward it merely opened the door for countless Moroder cameos and convinced Pharrell that what the world really needed was a 24-hour ‘Happy’ video.” “ RAM has some jams, but it doesn’t feel pivotal in the same way that Discovery did,” Pitchfork concluded. Even professional critics have gotten into the act: In 2021, when Pitchfork “rescored” a selection of classic album reviews, the site inevitably singled out RAM, lowering it from a “Best New Music” worthy 8.8 to a lukewarm 6.8. “Random Access Memories is overrated” is such a commonly stated opinion that it’s practically a meme on social media. The year after the album came out - and around the time that Daft Punk was collecting all of those Grammys - journalists were already insisting that RAM was (emphasis mine) “ widely considered overweening or at least overrated by dance-music purists.” In lists of overrated albums, RAM is a mainstay - this is true now, and it was true in 2013. Whenever there is a conversation about Random Access Memories, the matter of its supposedly exaggerated “rated-ness” always seems to come up. It is also - according to some people - overrated. By pretty much any metric, it stands as a significant milestone in contemporary pop culture, an occasion marked by a special “10th Anniversary Edition” due Friday. A decade later, it remains a healthy streamer, with six of the album’s 13 tracks racking up at least 100 million spins. The fourth (and possibly final) LP by the pioneering French electronic duo Daft Punk, Random Access Memories topped the charts in more than 20 countries, spawned one of the era’s most ubiquitous hits with “Get Lucky,” and won multiple Grammys, including Album Of The Year and Record Of The Year (for “Get Lucky”). This month, one of the most acclaimed albums of the 21st century turns 10.

Daft punk break up memes