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A positive sample

For those with two minutes to spare, the YouTube video ‘Where Daft Punk got their Samples from’ is a treat. Less perhaps for its actual ‘revelations’ than for the mixture of revulsion and disillusionment represented (alongside more sensible opinions) in the comments section. For some, it’s a Crying Game moment. The indie kids are through the looking glass, their icons shown up for the talentless, thieving scoundrels they really are.Sample-bashing of this sort pervades widely-held opinions on many genres. Rappers are said to just talk over others’ music; DJs to cannibalise a hook and repeat ad nauseam; pop acts to nick the backing and submit to diminishing returns. It’s all too easy to denigrate, chillin’ as we are in the indie ghetto. But, on closer inspection, we’d be better off cleaning up our hood before talking trash about others’.

Anyone who has ever heard a mash-up will be aware of the interchangeability of so many songs, chord changes lining up eerily. Unintentional though it may be, the parallels with the samplers are obvious. One could easily accuse Green Day, to quote one well-known example, of ‘singing’ ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ over ‘Wonderwall’. There is very little virgin territory out there, then, and even artists looking to take a walk on the wild side will find themselves treading in the footprints of countless predecessors. However close to their influences, artists are attempting to produce something new. Whatever debt they have to others, they will be contributing something singularly their own to it. In the case of the good, this even improves upon what has gone before.

And this brings us back to Daft Punk. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of that YouTube video is its claim to debunk. Odd, considering the French duo have released a compilation of this source material, hardly the act of secretive fraudsters. A similar video shows how easy it is to create ‘One More Time’ from its source material using editing software. This is all well and good. But it misses the point. The editing required to produce ‘One More Time’ may be simple, but how many of us could hear a floor-filling chord progression in such unpromising source material? Looping Ray Charles may be child’s play, but how many of us have the flow to turn the result into a global hit?

Obviously, much sampling is lazy, unoriginal and even cynical. But that doesn’t make a damning case against the whole technique, no more than dross indie bands forfeit the genre’s right to acceptance. It may be bad art, but it is art all the same. If we are to accept that bands are a product of their influences, then the use of samples is simply the logical conclusion. And just as we look for value-added in any band, so we do so when a sample is used. Watching the video, for me, did not lessen my respect for the duo as musicians. My first thought, rather, was to wonder how the hell they had produced such gems from such dross.

Conventional wisdom may tell us otherwise, but perhaps it is possible to polish a turd.

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