In 1981, electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk sang the praises of the technological marvel that is the pocket calculator. At the time, it was enough just to celebrate the ability of a tiny device to do your adding and subtracting—to praise it for “controlling and composing” and its “special key [that] plays a little melody.”
But it’s now 2021, and we need calculators to do more impressive things if they’re going to keep proving their value to us. Now that we’re jaded by the commonplace wonders of modern life, we need people like Korean YouTuber 차커 Chaco to show the value of the calculator by using a bunch of them to perform full songs.
차커 Chaco writes, “My calculator doesn’t do math, but it plays” on his channel bio, and, well, it sure does. In one of his most recent videos, he lines up three calculators and performs Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” in its entirety, never missing a note as his fingers dance across way too many buttons to tap out an instrumental version of the song above a backing track of clacking plastic. In another homage to the memory of Daft Punk, 차커 Chaco adds a fourth calculator to his deck and plays through “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”
Not only is his channel evidence of a skill that’s equal parts absolutely absurd and legitimately impressive, but they also suggest that 차커 Chaco was, bar none, the best guy to sit next to in math class.
