A-Trak Details Work on Kanye West's "Gold Digger," "Stronger" & "Robocop"

After the likes of Rick Rubin and Michael Bolton took to Genius to annotate some of select songs, it was A-Trak’s turn to detail the work process behind the scenes for some of the songs he’s worked on. In addition to records for Cam’ron and Juicy J, the Fool’s Gold honcho highlighted the stories behind Kanye West’s “Gold Digger,” “Stronger” and “Robocop.” See some excerpts below and read all his annotations here.

Gold Digger[HOOK]
Next thing you know, it’s show time at Sasquatch. At the last minute, he gave me the track for “Gold Digger,” because he wanted to perform it. I ended up live-auditioning. I pulled up the sample for “get down” and I scratched during the choruses, and as soon as we got off stage he was like “Alright, you’re coming to LA, we gotta record this. I’ll pay for the flights, I don’t care.” I went to L.A. and recorded the scratches, and the rest is history.

Stronger
I gave him that sample. I’m the culprit. And I didn’t want him to sample it, that’s what’s funny. It sort of happened because Swizz Beats sampled “Technologic” for that Busta Rhymes record, “Touch It.” We were on tour in Europe in 2006, spending a lot of hours on the bus listening to the radio. Kanye heard “Touch It” and thought that beat was cool. I said, “He just swooped up Daft Punk.” And Ye said, “Who?” I just couldn’t believe that Kanye had never heard Daft Punk.

RoboCop [Verse 3]
What’s super interesting about Kanye’s approach is that, yeah, he does ask everyone. On the one hand, he’s super confident because he knows at the end of the day that he’s the only one with the vision of what the song should be. On the other hand, he’s honest enough about his own limitations that he doesn’t let his cockiness blind his sight. He knows that if he brings some of the greatest people into the room, the end work will be better. He’ll ask anyone — a bystander, someone’s girlfriend. “What do you think of this? Okay, cool. How would you do those drums?” And then he puts his confidence cloak back on and assembles it. It goes back to questioning what the term producer is. Because ultimately, he could choose to not even list any of the people around him, and just say he’s the producer, because he’s the one with the idea. I like the statement of the team effort, though.