After racking up accolades at Lollapalooza last weekend, French dance-funk duo Daft Punk came to Brooklyn’s KeySpan Park in Coney Island for their first New York show in more than a decade last night. With a eye-scorching (lights! LCD screens! lasers!) and mysterious (helmets! huge pyramid!) stage show, the group’s set is being heralded as the show of summer 2007.
The pair kicked off the night with a crowd-uniting cry to rival “Hello, Cleveland!” As lights streamed up from the giant onstage pyramid where Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter docked their turntables, a voice like Hal 3000 chanted “HUMAN. ROBOT. HUMAN. ROBOT.” Waving their hands and glowsticks in the air, thousands of people cheered — you could almost hear them thinking, “Human? Wait, thats me! Whoo!”
Granted, with a show that gave them firecracker-scale visual effects, a favorites-heavy set list (“Around the World,” “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” “Robot Rock,” etc.), and an awesome neon backdrop of a dozen Coney Island amusement park rides, the crowd was ready and willing to cheer for everything. The cold-pulsing intro to “Television Rules the Nation”? Whoo! Television! An
instant-remix encore where Daft Punk played “One More Time” one more time? Whoo! Irony! A light show that alternately evoked Tron, The Matrixs green code, the Illuminatis all-seeing eye, and, some blinking, red-eyed harbinger-of-death monster? Whoo! Harbinger of death monster! As a phenomenon, Daft Punk has always been a with-us or against-us thing, and by the time the encore drew to an end, as two fans in handmade cardboard robot costumes danced with frat brothers, gay boys and a mohawked girl, “us” was everybody.
Photo: Rahav Segev


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