international news _ 7th February, 2005
Daft Punk New Album Falters Before Launch
The highly anticipated follow up to 2001's Gold Disc awarded album Discovery by the French duo Daft Punk, due for release in March has drawn criticism from fans before it's release for the un-originality of the preview single 'Robot Rock' released last week on itunes. The track it is reported is a total ripoff of a 1978 Bayswater track titled 'Release The Beast' with the content of the track almost identical with the addition of the 'Robot Rock' Vocal.
This comes months after Thomas Bangalter publicly declared no samples were used on 'One More Time' only to have a member of their online fan based forum, 'Daft Crew' to find the very track it was lifted from.
With an initial reputation for doing things totally different at their time Daft Punk exploded onto the scene in 1996 with 'Da Funk' and 'Around the World' and doing it again with their disco sounding Discovery in 2001. Throughout their career the duo have had visuals to match with videos directed by Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and animation legend Leiji Matsumoto. You think Daft Punk are, or at least were, cool.
But really all this does for me is bring out all the same old arguments about the ethics of sampling tracks. When all the hype and bad press dies down though the album will inevitably will sell enough to allow Daft Punk not to do anything for another 4 more years, maybe it is based on samples, maybe it isn't totally original but so what? How many of the people likely to buy this will have been on the dancefloors in 1978 when the track the first singles sample was lifted from came out?
I'm sure the original composers will get their deserved royalties and if the new album even half measures up to their first two releases its going to be hammered by the rest of us who just like to get down to good music, wherever it comes from.
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Intl News "Daft Punk New Album" (2004/12/30)
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