Discovered: A Collection of Daft Funk Samples

There's a catch to tracking down the origins of sample-based music, and it goes beyond the standard questions of how significantly a producer changes the context of a song or how much money they might have paid for the rights to do so. That catch comes when you scan the liner notes for sample credits and discover that the source material of your favorite beat is terrible. "Peter Piper" and "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)" are stone classics, but have you ever tried to listen to Bob James' "Take Me to the Mardi Gras" or Tom Scott's "Today" in their entirety? Not exactly the weightiest stuff. The RZA and Jason Forrest and Juicy J & DJ Paul make great beats because they find new avenues of greatness for already entertaining music-- Al Green, Creedence, Willie Hutch, etc.-- but it's also impressive when a producer builds a pop music marvel out of someone else's schlock.

It's no secret that a lot of Daft Punk's best work is sample-heavy, though the revelation of their songs' source material is too often met with a bit of man-behind-the-curtain disappointment by the group's more easily disillusioned fans. A widely-viewed YouTube video montage entitled "Where Daft Punk Got Their Samples From" starts with the caption "I [heart] Daft Punk-- but..." "But" what? They got some of their best hooks from wonky jazz-funk and Barry Manilow? Uh oh, time to retract that "unconditional" status. If Discovered: A Collection of Daft Funk Samples proves anything, it isn't that Daft Punk are surreptitious thieves-- it's that they're transformative reinterpreters, and in more than a few cases, flat-out miracle workers.

Discovered pulls a neat trick by starting with the one song Daft Punk obviously cribbed from without actually managing to improve upon-- "Release the Beast", the 1980 song from Philly group Breakwater that was notoriously looped for Human After All's "Robot Rock". The Daft Punk track crumbles within a 10-foot radius of the original, a towering edifice of electro-funk that sounds like an army of rampaging Rick James clones copping AC/DC moves to a fist-pumping synth/guitar riff. All "Robot Rock" did was take out the fun parts: the close-harmony vocals, the mid-chorus guttural exhortations, and the intricacy of the rhythm guitar. And the ending air-raid siren, for that matter.

There's a couple other good songs on here, like Cerrone's intense Italo hit "Supernature" and Karen Young's likably campy Dr. Buzzard's knockoff "Hot Shot", but it takes a lot of straining to hear them as sample sources: The former is unrecognizably pitchshifted and slowed down for "Veridis Quo", while the latter is reduced to a miniscule snippet on "Indo Silver Club". There's also Chaka Khan's peerless post-disco classic "Fate", sampled for "Music Sounds Better With You", the 1998 club smash that Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter recorded with fellow house producer Alan Braxe and vocalist Benjamin Diamond. Epochal as that single is, it's the only instance on Discovered where a Daft Punk member took a recognizable portion of an already great song and made it shine in a different context. Too bad this collection misleadingly includes a house remix that bears little resemblance to the original 1981 version Bangalter and Braxe sampled-- which brings the comp into an area of meta so perplexing it's best to just completely ignore its ramifications and chalk it up to copyright issues.

Whatever its intent, Discovered mostly proves that the more recognizable one of its songs is as a Daft Punk sample source, the less likely it is to stand alone as an enjoyable track. There's some small amusement in hearing the intro to Little Anthony & the Imperials' "Can You Imagine", which provided the buoyant little riff and the "heeeeey/ Ain't it funky y'all/ Wheeee/ Whooo" vocal refrain for "Crescendolls", but its lower pitch makes it feel oddly sluggish compared to the Daft Punk track, and once it gets into the heart of the song-- idealistic but dopey vocals about "a world free of pain/ a world where color is only a name" and a backing groove that almost sounds funky enough to score "The Love Boat"-- it starts sounding like what it really is: a grab for a slice of the circa-77 disco pie from an R&B group who recorded their best and biggest hit in 1964.

Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby", looped and then chopped to smithereens on "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", sounds similarly lethargic, although if you're enough into post-Headhunters funk fusion it could be enjoyable-- as long as you can ignore Edwin's labored "fizz fizz fizz" lyrics. And without the euphoric vocoder vocals, pulsing heartbeat bass, and X'ed-up Eddie Van Halen solo of "Digital Love" to give it its rightful context, the intro of George Duke's "I Love You More" plummets off a cliff into a goopy slab of doe-eyed uptempo fuzak. It's all a little like finding out that one of the spaceships in the background of Star Wars' Death Star trench run scene was actually a shoe.