What appears to be a team-up of Daft Punk and Jay Z has found its way onto the internet. Leaked by a member of the Daft Club message board , Computerized was allegedly intended “ for an old Disney project ”.



Initially, the collaboration seemed too good to be true. While Jay Z raps about technology and alienation, his “broken heart on the email”, Daft Punk’s vocodered chorus seems ripped from the same cloth as Harder Better Faster. The backing track evokes the French DJs’ Tron: Legacy soundtrack, full of glitchy arpeggios and soaring strings. Computerized falls so close to cliche that many listeners assumed it couldn’t be real. As Noisey put it: “Calm down about [the song] ... it’s probably bullshit.”



But on 10 March, Pitchfork confirmed that Computerized is “real”, although it did not name its sources. Although the song was not, as claimed in reports, produced by Kanye West, it was a legitimate successor to One More Time and Digital Love. In other words, Jay Z did mean for people to hear his line about “macking on my BlackBerry”.



As for when and how Daft Punk intended to release Computerized, the best guess is that it was connected to the duo’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack. That 2010 film was produced by Disney and as an attentive Reddit user observed, Computerized uses excerpts from the Son of Flynn portion of the Daft Punk score. The timeline also seems right: the first allusion to a Jay Z-Daft Punk song called Computerized came from a Parisian blogger in 2011. That same year, Daft Punk released Tron: Legacy Reconfigured, a collection of remixes that featured work by Avicii, Paul Oakenfold and M83.

