Daft Punk Announces They've Split Up After 28 Years

Jenna Amatulli
·Reporter, HuffPost
·3 min read

Turns out when Daft Punk said, “We don’t stop, you can’t stop,” they weren’t being totally honest: The electronic dance music duo just announced that they’re splitting up.

In a nearly eight-minute video titled “Epilogue,” excerpted from their 2006 film “Electroma,” the French pair walk their separate ways on a flat terrain, wearing metallic motorcycle hats and jackets that read “Daft Punk.” A timer ticks in the background and grows louder and louder, counting down until it hits zero. One of the members explodes and the dates “1993 - 2021” appear on-screen, indicating the year Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter formed the band.

Despite the video’s vagueness, the band’s longtime publicist, Kathryn Frazier, confirmed to Pitchfork on Monday that the duo is in fact splitting up, but she gave no reason for the breakup.

Fans of the band will remember their earworm hits such as “One More Time,” “Around the World,” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” as well as their iconic robot-esque outfits. They’ve racked up many Grammy Awards over the years, including several for their 2013 album, “Random Access Memories.” The lead single on that album, “Get Lucky,” which features Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers, won them two Grammys alone, while the album itself won Album of the Year and Best Dance/Electronic Album.

Other highlights in the band’s career include composing the score for “Tron: Legacy,” a stint headlining the music festival Coachella, co-producing several tracks on Kanye West’s “Yeezus,″ and multiple collaborations with The Weeknd.

Upon news of the split, many fans couldn’t help but share how they would not be celebrating, just one more time:

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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This cemented the term in 18th-century vocabulary, along with its alternative name, “variolation.” This practice, and growing public familiarity with it, set the stage for acceptance of the first vaccine, which would change the course of disease. In 1798, English physician Dr. Edward Jenner proposed that inducing a mild cowpox infection could protect against smallpox – which he called a “vaccine,” from vaccinia, meaning cowpox. Millions of people already have been vaccinated. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images Say its name Immunization campaigns for approved and established vaccines have often gone unnamed, simply listing the disease name, location and date, like the 1916 typhoid vaccine campaign in North Carolina’s Catawba County, northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina. Even sponsored vaccine programs have not necessarily taken on the name of the supporting corporation. In 1926, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. donated US$15,000 toward the eradication of diphtheria in New York. Despite this contribution, the campaign went unnamed. In the trial and development stage, vaccines were not typically named, even in the press. News articles referred to the “anti-disease” vaccine – that is, “anti-smallpox,” “anti-typhoid,” “anti-tetanus” – sometimes including the lead scientist’s last name, as with the Enders measles vaccine. For example, although polio vaccine trials in 1954 labeled the recruited child participants “polio pioneers,” the vaccine itself was called the “anti-polio” or Salk vaccine. Nicknaming vaccines can be a problem When vaccine campaigns have been named, catchy or abstract names can be problematic, especially in the experimental stages. The 1950s gamma globulin trials prompted confusion with the nickname “Operation Lollipop,” which referred to the “all-day sucker” given to children after the injection. Some people misunderstood, believing that scientists had delivered the actual polio virus in the candy to participants, prompting clarification that the name “had nothing to do with the experiment itself.” A Star Wars poster from 1977 encouraged immunization. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention More often, campaigns and slogans have been used in catch-up immunization drives after already widely distributed vaccines, as in the polio vaccine “Wellbee,” Utah’s 1967 “Muzzle Measles,” the 1977 Star Wars “Parents of Earth” message or the 1997 Dr. Seuss Immunization Awareness Campaign. These programs highlighted the importance of existing vaccines, rather than introducing new ones. As public health officials have noted, the title “Operation Warp Speed,” combined with the lack of a strategic COVID-19 response plan under the Trump administration, took away from the strict adherence to safety protocols that vaccine producers and the Food and Drug Administration have followed. In a Gallup Panel survey from Dec. 15, 2020, to Jan. 3, 2021, 65% of participants said they would get the vaccine, with divisions in age, race, education and party affiliation. The name “Operation Warp Speed” paired with coronavirus misinformation, much of it directly from Trump, likely contributed to the lack of trust in the vaccines before they were even developed. At least 75% to 80% of the population needs to become immunized – the number needed for herd immunity – to end of the pandemic, according to Fauci. Thus, I believe it will be important to develop a trustworthy campaign and a name that bolsters confidence. The Biden administration is not starting from scratch. I believe that the Biden administration’s adoption of a new direct name for its response plan is the first step toward pandemic recovery. Building confidence across various groups and communities will be critical for herd immunity to be achieved. The new campaign name, then, initiated what needs to be a straightforward, factual approach, integral to widespread COVID-19 immunization.This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Katherine A. Foss, Middle Tennessee State University. Read more:How does the Johnson & Johnson vaccine compare to other coronavirus vaccines? 4 questions answeredCan vaccinated people still spread the coronavirus? Katherine A. Foss does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

  • Tobacco killed 500,000 Americans in 2020 – is it time to control cigarette-makers?

    Four Americans die every year for every one person employed in the U.S. tobacco industry. Julien Fourniol/Baloulumix via Getty ImagesTobacco use killed an estimated 500,000 Americans in 2020, about the same number the pandemic killed in one year. Although education efforts by government and nonprofits have helped to curb tobacco use, 14% of American adults still smoke, even with warning labels on the packages. Tobacco deaths are so high that the World Health Organization calls smoking an epidemic. A potential solution to tobacco-related deaths is a corporate “death penalty” – otherwise known as judicial dissolution – when a judge revokes a corporation’s charter for causing significant harm to society. The legal procedure forces the corporation to dissolve; it ceases to exist. Both management and employees lose their jobs. Although legal, corporate death penalties in the U.S. have not been used in years. Yet even the threat of one can be effective. For example, simply announcing the intention to revoke the charters of two tobacco industry misinformation groups (the Council for Tobacco Research and the Tobacco Institute, Inc.) resulted in both quietly closing in 1999. I became intrigued with corporate death penalties while researching another topic – alternative energy sources. One statistic stuck with me from my own research: Replacing coal power with solar energy would save an estimated 50,000 American lives per year because of the air pollution produced by coal-fired power plants. The dead would fill the seats of the Sun Bowl. With solar already widely available and less costly than coal, and as coal companies continue to go bankrupt, there seems no reason to drag out the inevitable. I began to wonder: Is there a way to control an industry that causes unnecessary death? Cigarette smoke wreaks havoc on the body. Setting the minimum bar Building a generalized model for applying a corporate death penalty first requires the comparison of human rights to an industry’s right to existence. My model relies on three assumptions, based on the U.N.‘s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Everyone has the right to life. Everyone has the right to work. Human law should give corporations the right to exist if they benefit humanity. Put simply, corporations may act as a single legal entity – that is, as a person – to efficiently create jobs and generate profit for the benefit of humans. When corporations create profit and jobs, they can largely be viewed as good, unless they interfere with our right to life. That last bit is the tricky point. Essentially, it means a company or industry, at the very least, must earn its right to exist by employing more people than it kills each year. Perhaps that sounds a bit arbitrary, but let’s call that the minimum bar for an industry’s existence. (This is the absolute minimum. Most people, including myself, would agree that a single job does not equal the value of one life.) Even though warning labels have been on cigarette packs since 1966, millions of Americans still smoke. Wikimedia Industries that would be banned Imagine the corporate death penalty dealing with a new industry represented by a flagship company: “Lazy Assassins Inc.” Lazy Assassins, under aggressive corporate leadership, estimates it could employ 120,000 professional killers that would eliminate one victim per employee per quarter. That’s 480,000 lives per year. That’s almost exactly the number of Americans the tobacco industry employs, and almost exactly the number of Americans it kills each year: 124,342 jobs and 480,000 deaths, including 41,000 from secondhand smoke. To put it another way, four Americans die every year for each tobacco industry employee. Granted, with tobacco companies, this is an all-or-nothing proposition. If only a handful of companies had their corporate charters revoked, other tobacco companies would simply ramp up production to fill the demand. But if all the charters were revoked, no tobacco company would exist to fund distribution or advertising. There would be only limited access to tobacco products. They could still be produced and used, just not on an industrial scale. That way, we would still maintain the “rights” of smokers to harm themselves. We have made major changes to our economy to prevent even more COVID-19 deaths. With that in mind, isn’t it reasonable to help 124,342 people find new jobs in exchange for saving 480,000 American lives every year? [Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.]This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Joshua M. Pearce, Michigan Technological University. Read more:Cigarette smoke can reprogram cells in your airways, causing COPD to hang on after smoking endsWho’s smoking now, and why it matters Joshua M. Pearce does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

  • Kohl's reports mixed 4Q results but offers upbeat outlook

    The earnings report comes out as Kohl’s is fighting back against an investor group’s efforts to take control of the department store chain’s board, arguing that it would derail its progress and momentum. The investor group had said it had nominated nine members for Kohl’s board of directors as it looks to boost the company’s stock and its financial performance.