Daft Punk: Geniuses or Rip off Merchants?
You may have seen this doing the rounds on the interweb recently. Sparked by a Daft Punk edition of Palms Out Sounds magnificent Sample Wednesday in which we get to hear just how much songs from Discovery, Human after All and to a lesser extent, Homework utilise WHOLE PARTS of other tunes as the guts of the songs. If you haven’t heard these before, you might be very, very surprised.
Now I’ve laid out my thoughts on Daft Punk in their current carnation before, but regarding the use of these samples there are two schools of thought:
1) The extent to which they have sampled the tunes goes beyond normal sampling and is more like direct pilfering of the songs in question and therefore not cool.
2) The end results of the sampling are better than the original recordings and therefore Daft Punk are musical geniuses for using the samples to such effect.
“Robot Rock”, “Harder Faster Stronger”, “Crescendolls” and “Digital Love” are particular eye-openers. I can’t help but feel that after watching the video, people will feel a little duped. Personally, I think it goes beyond sampling so I would side with the first school of thought. Head over to Palms Out Sounds to hear the full original recordings.
