Sunburst Viral- Latest News on Celebrities, gossip, TV,  music and movies
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Featured News
  • Celebrity
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Gossips
  • TV
  • Comics
  • Books
  • Gaming
  • Home
  • Featured News
  • Celebrity
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Gossips
  • TV
  • Comics
  • Books
  • Gaming
No Result
View All Result
Sunburst Viral- Latest News on Celebrities, gossip, TV,  music and movies
No Result
View All Result

Why pop music has become saturated with interpolations & samples

by Sunburst Viral
2 years ago
in Music
0
Home Music
0
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter


If you’ve been paying close attention to mainstream pop music lately, you may have noticed that a lot of it sounds vaguely like something you’ve already heard before. 

Last summer, Bebe Rexha and David Guetta’s “I’m Good (Blue),” went viral on TikTok and Twitter, slathering the infectiously repetitive chorus of Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Be Dee)” with fizzy EDM piano chords and blissed-out lyrics that feel generated from an AI on spring break. More recently, Kim Petras’ latest single and team-up with Nicki Minaj, “Alone,” borrows heavily from Alice Deejay’s iconic late ‘90s dance track “Better Off Alone,” slowing down its club-heavy production and morphing it into an intriguing if sluggish trap beat.  And that’s not the only recent interpolation from Minaj, one of our most preeminent hip-hop/pop crossover artists. Earlier this year, she altered Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)” into a Flamenco-inspired bop with “Red Ruby Da Sleeze,” and before that in 2022 she sampled Rick James on the “Anaconda” rehash “Super Freaky Girl.” (Her latest single fares only slightly better — simply because it features the hilariously WTF line, “I don’t fuck with horses since Christopher Reeves.”)  

Read more: Miley Cyrus albums ranked: From worst to best

Though pop music recycling tunes from the past is as old as pop itself, this increasingly widespread fad of interpolation (recreating a song note-for-note) and sampling (copying and pasting a snippet of a song) has effectively flattened mainstream pop music into an uncanny valley of sonic pastiche. A reliable formula may guarantee commercially successful results, but an overreliance on regurgitating older intellectual property only serves to highlight a failure in capturing what made the original work so, well, original in the first place. 

Even music listeners have taken notice of this endless feedback loop of monocultural pop and have responded critically to the risk aversion and creative disposability that defines the trend. But despite the online discourse, music publishing companies haven’t stopped mining the internet’s obsessive fixation on pop culture history for how to best catch the rapidly dwindling attention spans of fans. This is an especially alarming concern for musicians whose sound is entirely devoted to taking from more popular works without adding any further flair to them. 

For instance, Meghan Trainor recently cashed in on this fad with “Mother,” which interpolates the Chordettes’s frequently sampled and covered “Mr. Sandman.” Given Trainor’s brand of department store-friendly doo-wop, it makes sense that she would recontextualize a song from the era. However, in refashioning the song’s recognizable “dum-dum-dum” refrain into an on-the-nose condemnation of hypermasculinity (“you’re just a bum-bum-bum”), “Mother” only reiterates how incredibly dated and uninspired Trainor’s artistic vision is, with its themes of women’s empowerment echoing the #girlboss feminism that dominated the 2010s. The use of the song’s other sample — an ironic TikTok of a man saying, “The fact that Meghan Trainor is literally mother right now” — also feels like a misguided, contrived attempt at pandering to an online, progressive audience.

Ava Max is another example of the pop nostalgia-industrial complex, often known for reworking several older pop songs from artists like ATC, Jon Bovi, Bonnie Tyler, Aqua, LeAnn Rimes, and ABBA to fit her dance-pop template. Even though Max is well aware of her overuse of interpolations and the criticism from pop fans, she remains steadfast in maintaining her strategy. Max has a strong voice and her music certainly makes a fun soundtrack for a Drag Race lipsync, but it’s frustrating to watch a clearly gifted artist limit their own ambition to what’s comfortable — making what sounds like a classic but isn’t one itself. 

This anodyne pop pastiche is affecting the hip-hop world too, arguably to a worse degree. Rising rapper/singer Coi Leray did a minorly tweaked update of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s “The Message” (a frequent snippet in reportedly over 300 songs) for her most popular single, “Players.” When comparing the two, Leray’s take is shorter, more polished, and lyrically simpler, but otherwise resembles a hollow, perfunctory facsimile of the genre-defining classic. Even her verses mimic the cadence of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Nasty Boy” and Nate Dogg’s outro on Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode.”

The same goes for her more recent single, “My Body,” a cringey re-interpretation of Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party,” and her feature alongside Anne-Marie on David Guetta’s “Baby Don’t Hurt Me,” a numbingly algorithmic remix of Haddaway’s “What is Love.” 

Yung Gravy, another TikTok fave, has also revolved his entire discography around lazily riffing from older songs, from Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” to Player’s “Baby Come Back” to (once again) “Mr. Sandman.” 

Both hip-hop and pop have a lengthy, rich history of interpolating and sampling, but these particular songs simply microwave the sounds and feelings from an older era. Not only that, they are bittersweet reminders of how much better those original works are.Simply acquiring the rights to older hits in order to redistribute them not only leads to potentially sticky legal complications, but furthers the creative drought we’re currently in. Just look at the oversaturated, fatiguing reboot/remake-centric entertainment market, where IP reigns supreme and TV and films made in this century are already getting revamped. Essentially, it’s disappointing to see commodified nostalgia become so continually ingrained in the fabric of our culture that people with the most to spend on making art are seemingly so uninterested in creating their own original timeless works.  

Of course, not all recent interpolation/sample-heavy songs are valueless. Take Ariana Grande’s brief but clever flip of *NSYNC’s “It Makes Me Ill” in her slinky “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored,” Doja Cat and SZA breezily absorbing Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” for their addictive collab “Kiss Me More,” or Charli XCX extracting two great Europop bangers — September’s “Cry for You” and Robin S.’s “Show Me Love” — to underscore her deeply catchy songs “Beg for You” and “Used to Know Me.” Though Olivia Rodrigo reused similar chord progressions from Paramore and Taylor Swift for “good 4 u” and “deja vu” (and retroactively credited those artists after some noticed and publicized the similarities), both songs still stand as promising efforts from the up-and-coming pop singer. Beyoncé, arguably the biggest pop artist of our time, has a discography rife with innovative interpolations and samples. 

What makes these interpolations and samples great isn’t necessarily exposing younger audiences to a classic work or honoring the emotional staying power of the older song. It’s bringing an entirely new, specific angle to it — a way of creating a dialogue between the past and present. Interpolating and sampling may continue to be a prominent constant in pop music, considering TikTok’s acceleration of this particular trend and our culture’s yearning for pacification and predictability after years of chaos. But pop music trends do come and go (remember the millennial whoop and cursive singing?) and newer pop artists that emerge in the next few years will hopefully learn from the past instead of trying to replicate it.





Source link

Tags: celebrity newshollywood gossipshollywood newsinterpolationslatest hollywood newsMusicPOPSamplessaturated
Previous Post

Robert De Niro & Girlfriend Tiffany Chen Step Out at Cannes After Baby

Next Post

City Boy Has The Classic Superhero Origin Story (Spoilers)

Related Posts

The ABCs of Life According to the 2025 XXL Freshmen
Music

The ABCs of Life According to the 2025 XXL Freshmen

by Sunburst Viral
June 30, 2025
Pacha Teams Up With Hearing Protection Startup, Hears, to Save Clubbers' Ears
Music

Pacha Teams Up With Hearing Protection Startup, Hears, to Save Clubbers' Ears

by Sunburst Viral
June 30, 2025
Watch Robert Smith Perform With Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury
Music

Watch Robert Smith Perform With Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury

by Sunburst Viral
June 30, 2025
Marilyn Manson’s U.K. Tour Opener Canceled Amid Backlash
Music

Marilyn Manson’s U.K. Tour Opener Canceled Amid Backlash

by Sunburst Viral
June 30, 2025
Faith No More’s Mike Bordin Recalls Powerful Encounter With Ozzy
Music

Faith No More’s Mike Bordin Recalls Powerful Encounter With Ozzy

by Sunburst Viral
June 29, 2025
Next Post
City Boy Has The Classic Superhero Origin Story (Spoilers)

City Boy Has The Classic Superhero Origin Story (Spoilers)

GET THE FREE NEWSLETTER

  • Trending
  • Comments
  • Latest
Book review of The Night Librarian by Christopher Lincoln

Book review of The Night Librarian by Christopher Lincoln

July 30, 2024
Dance Moms’ Christi Lukasiak Arrested for DUI 

Dance Moms’ Christi Lukasiak Arrested for DUI 

July 16, 2024
Central Cee, Hunxho, NoCap and More

Central Cee, Hunxho, NoCap and More

January 24, 2025
Demon Slayer’s New Mario Party-Style Game Gets An Overview Trailer

Demon Slayer’s New Mario Party-Style Game Gets An Overview Trailer

February 13, 2024
Gene Hackman death: Police release bodycam footage from outside home – National

Gene Hackman death: Police release bodycam footage from outside home – National

March 25, 2025
Taylor Swift subpoenaed in Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni legal battle – National

Taylor Swift subpoenaed in Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni legal battle – National

May 12, 2025
She’d Be A Great Wonder Woman

She’d Be A Great Wonder Woman

June 30, 2025
Bruce Willis’ youngest daughters look so tall in latest family update

Bruce Willis’ youngest daughters look so tall in latest family update

June 30, 2025
This Visionary Director’s Unforgettable Debut Film Named as the Greatest Horror Movie of the 21st Century

This Visionary Director’s Unforgettable Debut Film Named as the Greatest Horror Movie of the 21st Century

June 30, 2025
The ABCs of Life According to the 2025 XXL Freshmen

The ABCs of Life According to the 2025 XXL Freshmen

June 30, 2025
Ts Madison Reflects On Breakout Role In Zola With Hilarious Prayer

Ts Madison Reflects On Breakout Role In Zola With Hilarious Prayer

June 30, 2025
Kim “D” Shares Why Melissa and Joe Gorga Skipped Teresa Giudice’s Wedding

Kim “D” Shares Why Melissa and Joe Gorga Skipped Teresa Giudice’s Wedding

June 30, 2025
  • Home
  • Disclaimer
  • Privacy Policy
  • DMCA
  • Cookie Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Contact us
SUNBURST VIRAL

Copyright © 2022 - Sunburst Viral.
Sunburst Viral is not responsible for the content of external sites.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Featured News
  • Celebrity
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Gossips
  • TV
  • Comics
  • Books
  • Gaming

Copyright © 2022 - Sunburst Viral.
Sunburst Viral is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Go to mobile version