This is thematically amazing when you consider what the song is about — the roboticization of the abducted band. (Music video:)

https://youtu.be/gAjR4_CbPpQ

In this song, which is also chapter four of the movie Interstella 5000 movie (spoilers from here!), the knocked-out singers are scanned, parameterized, brainwashed, uploaded into The Matrix, and then used in the following songs of the movie-album to robotically mass produce music.

It makes perfect sense that the BPM is 123.45 because that’s exactly the sort of thing you get when a manager (who’s shown at the end!) just enters some numbers on the keyboard into the bpm field. They don’t keysmash the numpad; they just hit 123456789 until the field is full!

So not only does the song itself convey what some boss thinks is music, robotically beating at 123.45 bpm, but it is itself about being endlessly-rotating brainwashed-boring cogs in a pop music production industrial machine. I’m pretty sure the movie scene cuts and animations are timed specifically to the beats of the song, but knowing that they’re timed to a machine-specific bpm that a human would never select at random with a metronome?

Absolute genius.

I had no idea. Thanks for posting this.

EDIT: At 123.4567bpm, I think the track has precisely 0.2345 seconds of silence before the first 'beat' of the song and actually has 456 beats total, which is either numerological nonsense or pure genius by Daft Punk. Math elsethread :)

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35 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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rightbyte 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It surely adds a nice flavor to one of their best songs. There wont be one time when the song is played from now on where I wont proclaim the this specific trivia.

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manytimesaway 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The record was released way before the movie, so no this is not the song's theme.

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ffsm8 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Urm, the release date of the movie is not actually an indicator wherever what he said was true or not.

It's more then likely the backstory he outlined, which is I believe a minor subplot non-essential to the main story of the movie - has been added like this precisely because that was the theme of the song.

Because this was actually made by humans, they frequently talk with each other when making art in collaboration

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manytimesaway 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This particular sequence in the movie (which is actually named Interstella 5555) is one of the most important ones in the plot.

Discovery has been explained many times by DP to be about childhood, not having any specific "theme" besides mixing disco and rock. Hence the name "disco very" and the "pun" in Veridis Quo. (which also happens to be a major sequence in the movie. Although DP never cared to enter the details of that particular composition, most likely memory hole'd by the protagonists.)

So no, this is definitely not the theme of the song. There are several years between the actual songwriting and the release of the movie. Heck, if you actually see the movie, the ending sequence kinda explains that this is "one" of many interpretations of the record...

Taking a look at past interviews, it is more likely that 5555 is about what surrounded the actual release of Discovery (hugely anticipated sequel to a magnum opus that was wildly different from expectations) rather than an idea that was here from the start; see also Human After All for a continuation on this theme.

	▲	altairprime 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
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