Kanye West releases 'Stronger'
Roc-A-Fella / Def Jam issues 'Stronger' — the lead single from Graduation, built on a Daft Punk sample of 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.' The track tops the Billboard Hot 100 and demonstrates Kanye's appetite for hybridizing hip-hop with French house and broader electronic music — a thread that would define his next decade of work.
Why it matters
"Stronger" was released as the lead single from Graduation on July 31, 2007. The release was timed to set up the album's September chart battle with 50 Cent's Curtis (both records dropped on the same day, September 11, 2007). Kanye and 50 had publicly framed the matchup as a contest: if Curtis outsold Graduation, 50 would stop releasing solo records. Graduation outsold Curtis by approximately 691,000 copies in the first week. The lopsided result is often treated as the moment the commercial center of gravity in rap shifted from the 50 Cent gangsta-rap aesthetic to the Kanye West college-graduate-electronic-sample aesthetic. The next decade of rap (Drake, J. Cole, Kid Cudi, the whole post-Yeezy emo-conscious-melodic register) is in some part downstream of that single sales-week comparison. "Stronger" was the single that made the moment land. The album confirmed it. 50 Cent did keep releasing solo records, of course, but never to the same scale. You can argue Kanye won the round. The numbers say he did.
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