Dear TikTok Rappers: Please Stop Rereleasing Pop Songs and Calling it Your Music
By: Harry Sutton
TikTok’s incessant obsession with 15-second clips of random songs has been a contentious phenomenon since the social media platform first broke into popularity in 2018. Whether you use the app or not, you won’t be able to escape the infectious blips of catchy songs after millions of people upload videos to them.
The whole world has gone through the same process over the past few months: at first, hearing “I WISH I KNEW… I WISH I KNEW YOU WANTED ME” was a refreshing and fun melody with a funky bass line by indie icon Steve Lacy, but after the 4,856,372nd time hearing that tune, I think we’re all collectively on the brink of insanity from oversaturation.
TikTok doesn’t only drive us insane though, it has certainly provided a platform for emerging artists to get more attention and has shown underrated music to a wider audience. TikTok brought life to the career of British emo-hyperpop singer Pink Pantheress, raised the likes of The Kid Laroi and 24kGoldn to superstardom, and showed the beautiful artistry of Yung Lean to the general public, with over eleven million TikToks having been posted to his song “Ginseng Strip 2002”. Looking at the grand scheme of things, TikTok’s viral tendencies with music have a flurry of effects, but recent thirst for TikTok fame among rappers has led to a hideous trend in new music.
In search of a TikTok eruption, rappers have started practically rereleasing old pop songs under the guise of a sample, and it’s somehow working in music’s current online environment. Rap’s most respected producers will tell you that the best way to sample a song is to implement it into your own sound so that it’s almost impossible to tell that it’s a sample. However, rappers searching for billboard success and internet virality have begun to simply reuse old hits with minor tweaks in recent years. Following the online success of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Girls in the Hood”, which used the exact same beat as Eazy-E’s classic “Boyz-n-the-hood”, TikTok rappers have caught on to this trend.
Some of this generation’s biggest leaders in rap have fallen into this corny gimmick, including Drake and Nicki Minaj. Hardly adding anything new to these songs, rappers have interpolated or simply copied and pasted choruses from pop songs like Fergie’s “Glamorous” and Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” which were entirely recycled by Jack Harlow and Yung Gravy respectively.
Similar to the controversy of Cardi B and Megan’s “WAP”, some rappers have added raunchy twists to old hits such as Nicki Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl”, where the Queen of New York uses Rick James’ “Super Freak” as an instrumental to discuss important topics such as licking it, riding it, and everything in between. Latto’s “Big Energy” uses the guitar riff of TomTom Club’s “Genius of Love” to compliment a guy who she is impressed with, noting his “big dick energy.”. Rappers lean on old pop samples as a crutch to make instant TikTok bangers without creating their own choruses, they’re added verses and lyrics are rarely the standout parts of the songs either, but the choruses will have hundreds of thousands of TikToks made to them.
While I wish I could be respectful and enthusiastic for all of this year’s Juice Jam performers, the most egregious example of this trend is the song “Betty (Get Money)” by meme rapper turned ‘that MILF guy’, Yung Gravy. This song pairs up the TikTok app, notorious for tattooing catchy hooks into listeners’ memories, with a 1987 hit that has earned a reputation as ‘that song you play to prank your friends’ after many years as meme music’s poster child. Singing the melody of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”, Gravy sings about his entrepreneurial lifestyle and how focused he is on making money. Good job Yung Gravy, you turned one annoying song into two annoying songs and you’re making a massive bag from it.
Not only does this recent craze insist on branding its sound into your mind, but it shows the desire for some of the world’s most supported and equipt musicians to make flat unenthusiastic music that relies on the creativity of older artists, simply for the purpose of TikTok play.
