Around the World

"Around the World" was released in 1997 from Homework and does exactly one thing: it repeats its title phrase 144 times over seven minutes of filter-disco production. That sounds like a joke. It isn't.

What Daft Punk understood - and what the track demonstrated with complete confidence - is that repetition in electronic music is not laziness but structure. The phrase shifts meaning across those seven minutes as the arrangement builds and strips back around it. By the time the track ends, "around the world" sounds like something profound rather than something obvious.

Michel Gondry directed the music video, in which different groups of dancers (mummies, robots, synchronized swimmers, skeletons) each represent a different element of the track's arrangement. It remains one of the best-loved music videos in dance music history and one of the clearest illustrations of how seriously Daft Punk took the visual side of their work from the very beginning.

Live, it was a regular fixture of the Alive 1997 sets and returned during Alive 2007 as part of the continuous mix. Paired with "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" in the tour's mashup format, it took on an entirely new life.