Guns N' Roses' attempted comeback has hit a snag, said Tom Breihan in Pitchfork. A German "electronic shoegaze" artist—Ulrich Schnauss—is suing for $1 million, saying that Guns N' Roses "samples unlicensed chunks" of his music (listen here and here) on a track from the band's Chinese Democracy album. And "if you listen to all three songs, it's a pretty tough claim to dispute."
Schnauss and his record labels, Domino and Independiente, "are going to have their work cut out for them in proving their case," said Daniel Kreps in Rolling Stone. The Guns N' Roses song in question, Riad N' the Bedouins (listen), "shares no resemblance to Schnauss' body of work." On top of that, "half the stuff on Chinese Democracy has existed for the better part of the last decade, while the two Schnauss songs came out in 2001 and 2003, so it'd be practically impossible to determine" who was first.
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