Did Daft Punk Get Lucky By Ripping Off Korean Guitarist?

Daft Punk song is strikingly similar to song written in 2010!   04-Sep-13

If the conspiracy theortists are to be believed, then Daft Punk were actually up all night to rip off a Korean guitarist YouTube celebrity and pass off his song as their own.

Zack Kim wrote a song called 'Robot Dance' in 2010, and uploaded it to YouTube in 2011 - which you can listen to above. The chord structure is strikingly similar to the one used in 'Get Lucky' by Daft Punk, in fact it's almost exactly the same bar the fact that Zack Kim is throwing in more 7th chord shapes.

It's also in the same key, starting on a Bm (Bm7 in Zack's case). So did Daft Punk stay up all night to trawl through YouTube and find suitable songs to rip off for the new album?

Some will inevtiably say yes, but Zack Kim's 'Robot Dance' feels like an obvious homage to Daft Punk, it seems like it's such a good homage that he's actually somehow managed to write a new Daft Punk song before they did. Our verdict is that this is a (huge) coincidence.

For Daft Punk, this wouldn't be a case of ripping off an unknown Korean guitarist, Zack Kim was incredibly well known around the world and at one time had a YouTube channel with millions of views. Although his channel seems to have been deleted, his material is still luckily available on other channels.

Famously, he played the 'Super Mario Theme' with two guitars. As in, he actually had two guitars strapped around his neck and played both of them at the same time.

So for a band as savy as Daft Punk, they must have known that it would come back to bite them on the derierre if they did indeed rip off 'Get Lucky' from Zack Kim's 'Robot Dance'. But the thing that is actually similar in this instance is the chord structure, not the melody.

As musicians we've all been bitten by the curse of writing what we think is a great chord structure, only to realise that it appears in numerous other songs.

Another similarity is that of Nile Rodgers' groovey guitar licks and the opening phrase from Zack Kim's song. The idea that Nile Rodgers could have been in on the act, sitting down with the Daft Punk guys in front of YouTube and working out how to best rip off a song by a Korean guitarist to release as their next major single is just a bit far-fetched.

Plus, everything Nile touches turns platinum, so you can imagine that Daft Punk would have left him to his own devices when it came to writing his guitar part.

The SonicState verdict? One of the biggest musicial coincidences in the history of planet Earth - a YouTube celebrity guitarist writes a song in homage to Daft Punk, and it's so accurate that it actually sounds like their next record.

It would be interesting to get Zack Kim's take on this though...