Given folk internet's function as psychic exhaust pipe, plus its fierce Darwinist tendencies––i.e. only the loudest and most opinionated and most cynical survive––one can imagine, with zero context, what the comments section of New York's most popular music blog Brooklynvegan typically looks like after any given post. The section tends to attract your younger disgruntled production assistant types, DPATs who relish blowing off anonymous stuck-at-work steam about whatever new band is good but not that good, the commentary never going much deeper than the sexual proclivities of other DPATs they clash with.

But then Daft Punk played––on a drizzly Thursday night in Coney Island about a week ago, an hour/hour-plus hike for most of the thousands who'd attended. Post-Punk, I witnessed the following BV commenter ecstasies:

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To call it a concert or show, is an understatement. Daft Punk called down rain from the sky & Keyspan was crackling with energy. Best in a lifetime.

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BEST

SHOW

EVER

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With this show (read: tour), Daft Punk elevated programming to an art form that everyone could understand and be touched by. They mastered the mix of multiple mediums and presented it within the context of what they were thinking and feeling. How is this different from Beethoven scoring and conducting music that he doesn't play? How is it different from Hendrix mauling and burning a Stratocaster on a stage? Instead of a guitar, they used touch screens. Instead of skinny pants/bedhead, they used robot costumes. Instead of guitar solos, facial grimaces and stage aerobics, they used LED screens.

It isn't different, it's art."

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It's worth repeating

BEST

SHOW

EVER

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I witnessed the second coming at Keyspan Park Thursday night. I have to contact the Vatican to tell them to drag Pope Benedict's ass down to Vegas for the Vegoose Festival in October, before the dead start to rise."

And so on. It's also worth mentioning that such gush comes after more than a year's worth of anticipation, which is to say several months’ worth of non-New Yorker positivity, the kind New Yorkers tend not to be too positive about. Between 96’s Homework and 01’s Discovery, Daft Punk count for many as major dance music gatekeepers, responsible for branch-out love to Derrick May and Digweed alike, for worse or for better. But this wasn’t tour music—club music for sure, anime soundtrack material too—which may be why DP thought hard and good and strong before taking their show stateside. Coachella 2006 was the first time most Americans had ever seen the duo play live, in robot gear, locked into a pyramid-shaped sound booth they’d made for themselves, the rest of the stage taken up by a huge lite-brite-style projection screen behind them, and a triangle latticework of lights that change color and pulse along with the music. YouTube clips, concert boots, and breathless praise came immediately after, faint simulacra of awesomeness but enough for those who weren’t there to wish they had been. Some lives had purportedly been altered, ours hadn’t, and for a year leading up to the Keyspan gig, Daft Punk became the avatar of Life-Altering Live Music Experience. To train out to Coney Island on August 9 was to enter into some kind of understood contract; by any means necessary, a combination of their efforts and ours, lives would be Braffed.