David Guetta

 

On August 24th 2009 I was in HMV debating whether to buy the standard or deluxe edition of the new David Guetta album "One Love" which had been released that day. I bought the standard edition. On 31st December 2010 having not listened to it for a long time, I gave it to a friend.

I first came across David Guetta around 2002, I can't remember whether it was "Love Don't Let Me Go" or "Just A Little More Love" that I heard first, but needless to say it had little impact on me at the time. I was predominantly listening to rap and R&B back then and dance music was very much on the back burner.

Fast forward to 2006 and I was very much into dance music again. Every Sunday I would watch the Galaxy Chart on MTV Dance. You'd get a mix of some genuinely good dance music and some pretty awful crap like Cascada. The presenter Jo Good appeared to have a similar opinion to me when it came to the music, she made no secret that she didn't like Cascada and all the other cheesy crap that would feature and seemed to like the good stuff. She would also mention several times that she prefers dance records not to have vocals, which is something I could relate to.

There was one exception though, as you may have guessed that was David Guetta. She was always quite complimentary towards David Guetta, but to me it was too commercial sounding for my liking. However, through hearing him on the Galaxy Chart week after week his music started to grow on me, so much so that I ended up buying his "Pop Life" album after it got released in 2007.

It was a commercial record for sure, but with the likes of Tocadisco and a pre-Swedish House Mafia Sebastian Ingrosso and Steve Angello featuring it had at least a bit of credibility in my book. 

Then in 2009 he went very commercial by collaborating with Kelly Rowland and topping the charts with "When Love Takes Over". Follow up "Sexy Bitch" featuring Akon also topped the charts.

I wasn't convinced by either of these records, but remembered that it had taken a while for his music to grow on me previously so thought I'd give them a chance, hence I bought the album.

After a few listens of the album it became apparent that it was never going to grow on me. I wasn't expecting anything underground sounding, I knew it would be commercial and I was fine with that. I was never a fan of having well known singers on almost every track, this was before pretty much every EDM record followed that formula. 

The worst thing though was the actual music. It was just so poor, no substance to it whatsoever. Yet it made him one of the biggest DJs in the world over the next decade or so. 

Although it clearly worked for him, one question is why did the quality of the music deteriorate so rapidly? This was a man who was already successful and already had a commercial sound.

The answer is Joachim Garraud. It's always been questioned whether David Guetta actually has anything to do with the writing of his music. If you look at the credits of any of his tunes you will find none of them have been written by David Guetta by himself. The co-writer on every track on every album up to and including "Pop Life" is Joachim Garraud. He doesn't co-write anything by David Guetta after this.

The tune I've posted is "133" which was from his first album.