The Rockafeller Skank

The lead single from You've Come a Long Way, Baby came out on 8 June 1998 and peaked at number six in the UK. It topped the chart in Iceland for a week and reached 76 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its backbone is the choppy riff from the Just Brothers' Sliced Tomatoes, a northern soul record, with surf-style guitar from Duane Eddy, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, and John Barry. Other samples include Bowie's Join the Gang, the Bobby Fuller Four's I Fought the Law and Jay-Z. The hook, right about now, the funk soul brother, is Lord Finesse's spoken intro on Vinyl Dogs Vibe, which Cook chopped into syllables and played on a MIDI keyboard.

Cook said the vocal sat at 160 bpm, and that Sliced Tomatoes went down well at the Big Beat Boutique the same week. Simon Thornton introduced him to a program called Hyperprism Pitch Changer that stretched samples to extremes, used on the slowed Lord Finesse section. Cook called it his Bohemian Rhapsody: the start and end were mixed at his house, the slow section was recorded at Thornton's onto DAT and then edited in. He has said that clearing the samples meant giving up all the track's royalties, so he receives none. Lord Finesse said in 2019 that he had agreed by fax without hearing the track, expecting hip-hop, and called that a big mistake.

Reception and afterlife

Billboard's Larry Flick called it an organically simple masterpiece. Entertainment Weekly's Will Hermes called it a remarkable splice-rock roller coaster. The album version is preceded by a real call-in to Boston station WBCN, in which a caller named Brad asks for the song. Doug Aitken directed the video. Cook did not like it, and preferred the Jonze tape that led to the Praise You clip. Cook played the song at the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Rolling Stone ranked it number 199 among the 200 greatest dance songs in 2022, and Billboard put it at 83 on its 2025 list of the 100 best. In December 2025 he released Satisfaction Skank, a version with elements of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction, licensed after several refusals from the band's management.