‘It’s a risk to put out something completely new’: why pop is so heavily plundering the past

Pop has always eaten itself, but its appetite for nostalgia has become more voracious than ever – particularly for the dance music of the 90s and 00s. There are now numerous singles that reference the era (most often with interpolation, the reusing of a lyric or melodic phrase) in the UK chart: Switch Disco and Ella Henderson’s React – likely rising into the Top 3 this week – samples Robert Miles’ trance classic Children, David Guetta’s Baby Don’t Hurt Me flips Haddaway’s immortal What Is Love, Kim Petras and Nicki Minaj’s Alone recycles the hook of Alice Deejay’s Better Off Alone, and Denham Audio has had a longstanding hit with a version of Strike’s U Sure Do. All of them hark back to an era of bright uncomplicated melodies, big melancholic chords, and messy nights out that went mercifully undocumented on social media.

Jack Melhuish – who, until Warner’s recent layoffs, served as general manager of Parlophone Records UK – says the tipping point for the craze came last year, when David Guetta and Bebe Rexha released I’m Good (Blue), which interpolated Eiffel 65’s Blue (Da Ba Dee) and later hit No 1 on the UK charts. “It wasn’t the first, but in terms of the scale of it, you’d be hard-pressed to find a 90s pop-dance sample that was as flagrant and as blatant as that,” he says. “After that record came out, there was a slight change from the producer and artist community, like: OK, now we can really go for this.”

These tracks differ from the way rap music has long used samples: the majority feature a faithful recreation of a vocal hook or the original song’s production. Both options create an uncanny sense of time warp, a kind of musical deja vu. Big-budget mainstream pop stars have been using the technique for a few years now – Ava Max is the undisputed queen, interpolating everything from Barbie Girl to Can’t Fight the Moonlight – and an interest in turn-of-the-millennium dance music among pop producers has been percolating for a while: in 2019, Joel Corry’s cover of Monsta Boy’s 2000 hit Sorry (I Didn’t Know) dominated the summer thanks to a placement on Love Island, and a year later Flume, Nea and GFOTY all riffed on Blue (Da Ba Dee), mere months apart from each other. But the past year has seen a huge glut of new songs that interpolate 90s and 00s dance classics, by everyone from mainstream pop names including Rita Ora and James Arthur to cheesy club favourites such as Nathan Dawe. Bradford bassline lads Bad Boy Chiller Crew are serial offenders, their latest a sped-up version of Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman.

Natalie O’Leary, a Radio 1 DJ who hosts the Sunday morning 00s throwback show, says that nostalgia – for music, but also for the carefree attitude expressed in many of these songs – is potent. “In the 90s, the clubbing scene in the UK was a huge thing, and these trance tracks were part of British culture. They’re these feelgood songs that aren’t too deep,” she says. When listeners explain why they love her show, she says, it’s often “people saying: ‘I remember my first kiss to this, I remember going clubbing for the first time and hearing this song, I remember being in Ibiza when this dropped.’”

Melhuish agrees. “These records take us back to simpler, freer times. Audiences need a bit of that relief at a time that still feels quite unstable for a lot of people.” Safiya Lambie-Knight, UK and Ireland head of music at Spotify, says feelgood music which speaks to “that culture of going out, live music, clubs, being with your friends” has become increasingly popular post-Covid, with a lot of songs that may have been once confined to more dance-specific playlists crossing into mainstream ones. Melhuish suggests that listeners are also looking back appreciatively to the kind of 90s and 00s monoculture that so rarely exists in music today, given that “the range of options for music consumers now is, frankly, overwhelming. I think in an era of infinite choice, audiences retreat to familiarity – they have quite a biological, synaptic connection with records they recognise.”

Nick Gale – AKA producer and songwriter Digital Farm Animals – says using a hook that has already proven successful is tempting for a lot of artists and record labels. “Artists are looking for security – and it’s always a risk these days to put something completely new out,” he says. “When you’re betting on a record, especially in today’s market, I would take my chances on a song people already knew, if I worked at a record label.”

While Melhuish says he has never been in a situation where a label will “go to an artist and say ‘Here’s a bunch of 90s samples, pick one’,” Gale says that “in the US, there are a few labels who are always looking for songs that use interpolations”. He prefers not to work with recognisable hooks, “because I feel like it’s purely an exercise of: ‘We want to have a hit, and we know this was a hit in the 90s.’”

The exception for him was Beg for You, a song he worked on with Charli XCX and Rina Sawayama that interpolated the hook of September’s Eurodance smash Cry for You. “With Charli and Rina, they’re both artists I really respect, and everything kind of gelled together,” he explains. “But in general, I’m less excited about remaking an old song almost the same as it was but with a harder kick drum and a donk baseline, which is often what I think labels are wanting.”

It’s easy to dismiss these songs as cheap hits capitalising on millennials looking to recreate the halcyon days of their youth, but Spotify’s Lambie-Knight says a lot of the audience for this music is new and from broad demographics. An older audience comes to a song already knowing the sample, and a newer one finds out about the music in real time: you’re doubling your audience, something Lambie-Knight says “isn’t necessarily something you would get if you were a newer artist” releasing original music. She adds that Haddaway’s own original version of What Is Love is getting an uptick in streams alongside Guetta’s rework. “If new audiences are discovering the original, it’s a win-win for everybody.”

Of course, pop is notoriously fickle, with trends often exiting the zeitgeist as fast at they enter. Melhuish says the speed with which this trend has proliferated speaks to “a new culture of pragmatism in music production – artists and producers are seeing what works, and giving the market more of what it wants”. Which is not to say these bombastic, 90s and 00s-referencing hits are a new pop mainstay. “As soon as someone does something interesting, everyone starts to do it; then the market becomes saturated and audiences become fatigued,” he says. “I think labels are now smart enough to know that it’s not prudent or sensible to overly engineer hits.”

Lambie-Knight thinks that we’re going to see “a lot more creative uses of samples, and a lot more in the way of collaborations and reworks”, in the style of Rita Ora’s Praising You, which also features Fatboy Slim in addition to sampling him. The sheer availability of music right now, she says, lends itself to a more sample- and interpolation-oriented pop music culture. “A hundred thousand tracks go live on Spotify every day, which means that the breadth of music you have the capacity to sample from is only going to increase over time,” she says.

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Which is not, Melhuish says, a sign of pop running out of ideas. He gives the example of P Diddy sampling Diana Ross and interpolating Sting in the 90s. “If you were sitting in Bad Boy records in 1996, you might be having the same conversation, saying, ‘We feel there’s a level of plagiarism and laziness here,’” he says. “But actually, it’s how culture works – it’s cyclical and it’s transformative.”

Gale, too, thinks that there’s still innovation happening in dance-pop. “Right now, in dance music, there’s a really exciting scene emerging – we had a bit of a lull through Covid, but people like Skrillex and Fred Again are super exciting,” he says. “It feels really fresh, and kind of underground again – but those artists make pop music, too. I don’t think we’re running out of ideas; I just think there’s so much new music now that a lot of familiar music cuts through. It’s great business. If you can release a song knowing it’ll become huge, why wouldn’t you?”