"Stronger" is released

Why it matters

The Daft Punk sample on "Stronger" is from "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" off the duo's 2001 LP Discovery. Kanye West chopped the vocal line and built a rap song around it, then spent over $1 million and what he later said was at least five mixes trying to get the production exactly right. The song went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The video, directed by Hype Williams, has Kanye in a hospital and recovering from his 2002 car-crash injuries (mostly metaphorically; the actual car crash had been five years earlier). "Stronger" is the song that put electronic music (specifically French house, specifically Daft Punk) into the center of commercial American rap. The same template (rap vocal over an electronic-music sample) would dominate a substantial chunk of the next ten years of major-label rap, from the Black Eyed Peas to Pitbull to Flo Rida. None of that scales the way it did without Kanye proving, with "Stronger," that a French-house sample could be a #1 American rap single. You can hear the door opening on this song. It opened wide.