Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

About

"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" is a song from Daft Punk's 2001 album Discovery. The song has had a massive fan following, and has inspired countless remixes, covers, and other fan works.

Origin

The song is found on Daft Punk's album Discovery, which was first released on March 12th, 2001.^[1] It was also released as a single on October 13th, 2001.^[2] The song's music video (shown below, left) comes from the anime musical Interstella 5555,^[3] which consists entirely of songs from Daft Punk's Discovery album. The music video was posted to YouTube by Daft Punk on February 26th, 2009, where it received over 121 million views in nearly fourteen years. The song was also heavily sampled in the 2007 Kanye West song Stronger^[4] (shown below, right).

Spread

Fan videos started appearing as early as 2001 on sites such as Newgrounds. On August 20th, 2001, evilzug posted a fan music video (YouTube reupload shown below, left) of the song to Newgrounds made in Macromedia Flash and used sprites from various NES games, such as River City Ransom, Narc, and Barbie. The video, titled Work It! – Olskoo NES, received over 1.9 million views until the video's deletion in November 2016.^[5] On June 7th, 2007, YouTube user Fr. Eckle Studios posted a video which plays the song along with the song's lyrics written entirely on their hands and fingers. The video (shown below, right) received over 75 million views in over fifteen years, and started the meme trend Daft Hands in the late 2000's.

On November 4th, 2014, a clip was posted from the French comedy show MARRAKECH DU RIRE 3 which parodied the song. The lyrics "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" were replaced with "Burger, Nuggets, Nuggets, Burger". The clip (shown below, left) received over 7 million views in over eight years. An animatic was made of the scene and was posted to YouTube by Burd-Lady on December 25th, 2015. The video (shown below, right) received over 3.5 million views in over seven years.

The song parody would later be used in other parody works. On February 9th, 2020, Twitter user frogecchi posted the song parody to a photoshopped image of a kitten dancing next to a cheeseburger and chicken nuggets.^[5] The video (shown below) received over 510,000 views and over 28,000 likes in over two years.

pic.twitter.com/V0h0pZWAib

— meepy (@frogecchi) February 10, 2020

On January 22nd, 2023, DiamondBrickZ posted a mashup of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger with Burger King's Whopper Whopper Song to TikTok. The mashup (shown below, left) received over 6 million views and over 679,000 likes in less than one month. The mashup has led to a wave of fan videos on both TikTok and YouTube. One example was posted to TikTok by anonomnom on January 30th, 2023. The video (shown below, right) received over 4.3 million views and over 402,000 likes in over three weeks.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References