From the second he strode onto the “Saturday Night Live” stage to perform “Black Skinhead,” Kanye West served noticed that his Yeezus album was going to be a departure.
And though he worked with a team of producers to shape his new sound, apparently none had the influence that Daft Punk did … at least that’s what the robots are telling Vibe magazine.
In a new interview, Daft’s Thomas Bangalter says that West consulted with the dynamic duo just as he was beginning work on Yeezus, and that the ideas they came up with laid the foundation for his arty, aggressive album.
“We were the first people that Kanye came to,” Bangalter revealed. “He really responded positively to those ideas we were throwing out to him. And then he ran with it and built the record, working with a lot of other producers and based on maybe some of the initial directions that we had laid out together.”
It makes sense, then, that the first three songs on Yeezus — “On Sight,” “I Am a God” and “Skinhead” — were all produced by Daft Punk. And, though Kanye has been adamant about pushing hip-hop into the future, it turns out that one of his album’s most memorable tracks was actually rescued from the robots’ Random Access Memories scrap heap.
“The first track we did was ‘Black Skinhead,'” Bangalter explained. “The drums we had recorded earlier during the recording of our album, so we had those. It was a great twist of pushing the envelope.”
Speaking of envelope pushing, by now you’ve seen the leaked, unfinished version of the “Black Skinhead” video, which began “making the rounds Monday, much to ‘Ye’s dismay. The finished version of the clip is apparently due “within the next week.”
