Gateway Drugs

Kanye West
Stronger

You know what's tragic? Ask someone if they like Daft Punk and you might find out. The problem is certainly not that you'd get a no, it's that they probably don't even hardly recognize the name. If you're one of those people, then this post is for you.

But don't let me get too far into why Daft Punk is freaking awesome just yet, let's start far away and close in on the good stuff. That's not to say our Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper du jour isn't good stuff...

That's right, you've all heard it, most of you liked it, and a few of you undoubtedly were compelled to dance to it: Stronger by Kanye West. It's a song with a good beat, reasonable lyrics when compared to other hippity-hop (Soulja Boy is such a tragedy... please do not superman your hoes), and most importantly heavy sampling of Daft Punk's song, Harder Better Faster Stronger.

So if Stronger got you dancing, it stands to reason that with a title four times as long, Harder Better Faster Stronger would get you on the floor and out the roof. Here's a piece of the original. Clearly a song carrying different emotions, relying almost entirely on musical merit rather than lyrical.

Now, to mention Harder Better Faster Stronger and not mention that it samples another song itself might be a little mean. Cola Bottle Baby, by Edwin Birdsong, is the origin of some background that you mainly hear at the beginning. Daft Punk just did what Kanye later did to their song: they used a part of Cola Bottle Baby and remixed it into their own stuff to make it sound awesome.

I'm going to be writing about Daft Punk a lot in the next couple of weeks, and so I might have to reference the following video a few more times. It's just some examples of Daft Punk songs and clips of the songs whence the main samples came, and since Daft Punk does a lot of sampling of various songs made since the advent of synthesizers in funk, there's a lot of samples to speak of.