Music isn’t a science — it breathes and moves, it adjusts to its surroundings. We know that everyone wants to figure this out as quickly as possible, but that’s not the way to take in music, and an album release like this one just shows more clearly than ever how unhealthy the state of music really is. We are literally trying to review albums — no, album leaks — within 24 hours. When it’s something with as much history, anticipation, and relevance as the new Daft Punk project, is that really how we want to handle it?

From DJ Pangburn’s Random Access Criticism: The Internet Pundits Are Ruining Daft Punk, Music (Motherboard)

Well, there’s no particular “way” to “take in music,” but more to the point we should probably just acknowledge the difference here between “reviewing albums” and having conversations about pop music. The Daft Punk meme was chatter-based, not writing-based. For a time, anyway (until I burned out on it, which was inevitable), I enjoyed reading the insta-reaction response to the album on Twitter and Facebook and ILX. It’s high school writ large and writ fast: you buy a new record, you argue about said record with your pals (some of whom also bought the same record) the next day in the school yard. But no, I don’t confuse this with highly literate, considered opinion about the new Daft Punk record (the reviews of which, for the most part, have been fairly boring to read — focusing on the red herring analogue angle, asking such probing questions as “is this a masterpiece”? — though perhaps the meme-overload just killed that off) (and maybe that’s the deeper underlying complaint here?).