Daft Punk: The Milli Vanilli of Electronic Music?

This will probably piss off a lot of Millennial & younger Gen X music fans (of which I am one), but so be it.  Ready?  Okay.

DAFT Punk are blatant rip-off artists who took away more from the songs they ripped off than they added to them.  

I had set out to write an article in which I simply shared the similarities I see between this group & other artists, but what I found was much more damning.  Not only did they steal their whole robot concept/vocoder style thing, they literally ripped off giant chunks of other artists' pre-existing work.  Perhaps that's why they officially ended things in 2021... the advent of websites like WhoSampled.com threatened to out them as the musical grifters they really were.  I now question the originality of everything they did, wondering if they ever truly created a single concept from thin air.

I don't say that lightly.  Some of my best college memories were made to Daft Punk tunes.  I have friends that have been to every concert & own every album on vinyl.  While it's true that there's "nothing new under the sun", these guys took that to a whole new level, taking giant pieces of the instrumental AND occasionally vocal parts of songs by other artists & passing them off as their own, all while being hailed the most innovative thing in electronic music.  One example is using Breakwater's "Release the Beast" (1980) intro in their "Robot Rock" (2005) over and over on repeat without really adding much to it. In fact they seem to have just put that intro on a loop & removed the lyrics.  Or stealing from another Black '80s artist Edwin Birdsong with their tune to "Harder Better Faster Stronger," which again samples so heavily from Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby" I'm surprised they didn't get sued for copyright.

Again, all electronic music and much of hip-hop's early production consists of samples, but these guys take it furthe, sometimes failing to credit the original artists OR do much to alter the music to make it their own.  I'd actually go so far as to call them musical curators rather than musicians.  Discovery is a "Frankenstein album" made entirely from repackaged pieces of other songs, while their song "Fresh" steals a chunk of disco artist Viola Wills' actual voice (you guessed it, another Black singer). They are the Kanye West of electronic music. 

Typical Daft Punk fan snobbery

The problem is, they're not held to the same standards.  It would be one thing if music heads didn't jack off to the "elite creativity & uniqueness" of a band who made songs like "Around the World" which just repeats that phrase for the entire 7:09 minutes, but I've seen some major music snobs acting like this duo is the most influential, unique band to ever do it.  This guy, for instance, apparently didn't care that they ripped off so much from other artists.  Cool story considering how it didn't affect him directly in any way.  Bet those OG artists they ripped off would beg to differ.  Their Wikipedia page also contains no references to their thievery...

"Future Party" by Syd Mead (who was allegedly pissed DP got the proportions wrong)

Here are the artists I noticed huge similarities with before looking deeper into the issue.  These are the ones they likely stole large chunks of their style or look from without directly sampling them because they were too popular.  Individuals or bands that came first and did it better:

Single "The Robots" recorded in 1977-78; listed as their "most popular song."

- Kraftwerk.  This one is obvious & accounts for the majority of their "robotic"/futuristic sound.  They even have a song literally named Aerodynamic.  What a coincidence!  Kraftwerk came out with a single called Aero Dynamik, though it appears Daft Punk's version came out first.  Still, the similarities are unmistakable, from the extensive use of vocoder to the synth-heavy sound.  Kraftwerk had a highly-popular single titled "The Robots" which seems to be Daft Punk's literal blueprint for their group, what with the robot suits and all.  It's like they created their robot characters by projecting themselves into a Kraftwerk music video.  (And then stole the exact design for those characters from the existing painting shown above).  

Hmmm... curiouser & curiouser.

- The Art of Noise.  This instrumental band had a 1986 album entitled "Daft," with the album cover featuring a face mask.  Very interesting.  They also had a #1 single in "Moments in Love" while mostly maintaining anonymity, not appearing as themselves in their music videos.  Their genre is classified as electronic/sound collage & is also heavy on synthesizer & electronic beats.  Art of Noise would've been huge when Thomas Bangalter & Guy Manuel de Whatever were coming of age just like Kraftwerk were.  While Art of Noise got their inspiration from a Futurist manifesto by Luigi Russolo, it's just that:  inspiration.  They used the novel to create their "sound collage/futurist orchestra" concept but didn't directly steal from it.  The way they sampled other music was also far more above-board than Daft Punk's whole-cloth thievery.

Innovator Roger Troutman demonstrates "voice box".

- Zapp & Roger.  Roger Troutman, that is.  He came up with the unique 'voice box' sound, singing directly into a rigged up machine to produce a totally fresh sound that had never been heard before.  The beat for "More Bounce" goes extremely hard for a track made in 1979/80, though younger music lovers will know Roger from the chorus of 2Pac & Dr. Dre's "California Love."  He collab'd with many other '90s rappers during his second burst of popularity in the Gangsta Rap era before being killed in a murder-suicide by brother Larry Troutman, but again, the Dafties likely became acquainted with Zapp's music in the early-mid '80s.  Songs like "Computer Love" and "I Can Make You Dance - Pt. 1" were clearly big influences. 




So What?  Everybody Steals

Yah we got rich ripping off other artists... get over it.

Whether you think this is genius or con artistry, there's no denying it's shitty how much they "borrowed" from obscure artists--usually Black--and sometimes didn't even credit them.  Recall when Vanilla Ice got sued by Queen & lost his whole career from his blatant theft of the baseline from ONE SONG?  These guys made a whole-ass career out of doing just that without shouting out the OG artists or otherwise acknowledging what they were doing.  Their music (if we can call it "theirs") is sonically more pleasing than most pop artists out today or in DP's heyday, but that doesn't make what they did OKAY.  Anyone can take giant chunks of other songs & build repetitive dance tracks out of them.  Well, anyone with the technical know-how anyway.  Milli Vanilli might've lipsynched, but at least they used their real likenesses to do it.  These two stole Black music and hid behind robot masks, the concept for which they also stole.

The fact that they claim to have broken up due to "concerns about AI in music" is rich considering the fact that their entire careers, personas & the actual music they made largely curated was ripped off from others who came before them.  Sorry guys, but you don't get to throw the authenticity flag when you yourself are inauthentic AF.  

Daft Punk's breakup video

The Dafties officially broke up and disbanded in 2021 in dramatic fashion with one last song/vid in which one of them explodes.  Considering everything we know now, it all seems a little less genuine & a tad more trite.