Cole Cuchna

This is some of the most beautiful music you'll ever hear.

Music made even more powerful by the meaning behind it.

On an album that equates music with life itself, this moment feels like Daft Punk's purest expression of humanity in sound form.

What we're hearing is joy, connection, love, memory, everything the album has been searching for unified into music.

But as we just heard, that euphoric vision is abruptly cut off.

A swelling mass of abstract sound rises to a sharp crescendo, almost like a portal violently closing shut.

And given what happens next, it seems to suggest that everything we just experienced, that transcendent vision of humanity, represented the very kind of memory Paul Williams sang about in the song's first half, the one that shook him back to life.

Because out of the silence, Williams returns to deliver one final, heartbreaking passage.

After experiencing the second half of Touch, these lyrics land as pure tragedy.

Our emotional experience of the music becomes a proxy for the narrator's own overwhelming encounter with sensation and feeling.

An experience so vivid, so transcendent, that it almost convinced him he was real.

This admission confirms Paul Williams' character is indeed a robot, a robot who has now tasted or perhaps remembered what it feels like to be human, to experience connection and joy and love and touch.

And now having briefly reconnected with that world, he's forced to return to a hollow mechanical existence, forever yearning for the very things humans themselves often overlook, take for granted, or even willingly sacrifice in the pursuit of becoming more optimized and technological.

And this is why Guimon described Touch as the core of Random Access Memories.

Why it sits directly at its center.

Why the rest of the songs orbit around its thematic gravitational pull.

Because the two halves of Touch ultimately reveal the album's complete thesis.

The first half tells the story of a robot yearning for humanity in a world increasingly moving toward technology.

And in its euphoric second half, in its beauty, purity, and emotional overwhelmingness,

In its celebration of touch, love, dance, memory, and connection, the song becomes a reminder of the value of the things that make us human in the first place.