Pop Hits Are Sampling Late ’90s
Billboard’s Jason Lipshutz reports that mainstream pop is finding late-’90s and early-’00s songs are ripe for pillaging. Machine Gun Kelly and Camila Cabello’s recent pop-rap hit “Bad Things†borrows its refrain from a 1998 sleeper hit by alt-rock band Fastball. (No, not “The Way.†The other one.) Meanwhile, Cabello’s debut solo single, “Crying in the Club,†slips in the “oh-oooh oh-oooh†melody from the chorus of Christina Aguilera’s 1999 breakout “Genie in a Bottle.†On Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,†a vaguely Caribbean pop slurry that’s somehow inescapable this year, the pre-chorus so closely echoes TLC’s “No Scrubs†that the songwriters behind the 1999 smash were belatedly added to the credits.
