Metal heads: Daft Punk go to market. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features
What is it about Daft Punk that inspires such online devotion from fans? Maybe it's the fact that they have been early adopters of various web-related developments. There was the Daft Club "loyalty scheme", which provided exclusive online content that was accessible only to purchasers of their albums. There have been the various film projects, complete with spin-off Manga action figures. Or maybe it's just the fact that they like to dress up as robots.
Whatever the reason, YouTube is full of ever more bizarre and intricate tributes to the band. The original Daft Hands video has amassed 14.5m views and produced several copycats, including petty one-upmanship and sarcastic spoofs. In the US, two girls went for the full body version, while film of a college choir have performing an acapella version of the song (which predates Daft Hands) has gained newfound fame thanks to the power of search engines.
The band are happy to encourage the homemade homages, linking to them via their own YouTube channel. (They also seem fond of the more professional efforts: the other week they teamed up with Kanye West at the Grammys to play a version of his Daft Punk-inspired single Stronger.)
Odd then that a blog from almost exactly a year ago highlighting the samples used by the band - and a subsequent video edit on YouTube - are generating a snowball of criticism. There's now an album available, Discovered, featuring the original sampled tracks. As Peter Robinson notes on Popjustice, the so-called scandal only serves to underline Daft Punk's ability to hear moments of inspiration that "the rest of us don't."
Anyway, far more importantly, Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Cristo has produced the new album by Sebastien Tellier, Sexuality, which is released on Monday (although three tracks are currently streamed on his MySpace page). It's pretty fantastic. Wherever the samples came from.
All of which is a longwinded way of saying this YouTube clip was inevitable.
