Daft Punk know how to make a track out of the smallest things. By sampling the first seven seconds of an 80s funk song, speeding it up, making the pitch a few tones higher, looping it and throwing in their own lyrics – a total of nineteen words used altogether – they created “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”, the fourth track from the duo’s 2001 sophomore album Discovery and one of their most popular too.
Took me a while to find this song. Initially hearing it when I was quite young, a brief few seconds of it played on an advert on the Disney Channel. The robotic vocal sounded like nothing I’d heard before but the trouble was I had no idea what it was saying – it may not have been saying anything at all. But it remained in my head for a long time. I can’t even remember listening to the full track for the first time because it’s just been one of my favourites for a while now, but I’m glad I found it.
It’s groovy, it’s funky, it’s repetitive, but not in the way that it will bore you after many listens. It always remains fresh.
Kanye West sampled it for his own use too, but it’s not the same.
The Music in My Ears 