Yung Bae (left) with “Silver and Gold” collaborators Pink
Sweats and Sam Fischer
Dallas Cotton, the future funk producer and internet sensation popularly known as Yung Bae, worked on the 2019 track “Bad Boy” in his couch and finished it before he knew it. And so, seeing it gain steam and eventually blow up on various social media platforms was simply “crazy.”
The song, which also features hip-hop artists bbno$ and Billy Marchiafava, has since become his biggest hit, with more than 100 million streams and over 2 billion impressions across a million TikTok clips.
Did he expect the song to get that much love from the people? “Not in the slightest!” he said at a recent virtual group interview arranged by Blackstar Asia. “I remember working on it with bbno$ through FaceTime and he wrote his part in what felt like an hour. Then he said, ‘Yo, I’m back. My grandma is dancing to it in the background.’
“We never expected anything like that. It has been the craziest and coolest thing. Suddenly, there’s my song on the radio, it’s on a cat and dog video. Either way, I’m just so happy and thankful,” Yung Bae said.
He has since signed with Sony Music’s Arista Records and put out more hits, like “Revolving” and “Sundress.” The American artist, who started making music around 2014, now has six albums under his belt.
The style Yung Bae specializes in is future funk, a vaporwave-inspired subgenre that melds smooth jazz, disco and old-school hip-hop into warm, buoyant pieces that evoke nostalgia. It often uses samples of Japanese City Pop songs and, at times, accompanied by 1990s anime or pop culture aesthetics.
‘Created from scratch’
The 27-year-old’s most recent work, however, had him finding his own sound. His latest single, “Silver and Gold,” for instance, features samples that he “created from scratch.”
“I hope to kind of elevate my sound by combining my old self and new influences. It’s more or less the same sound but the end goal is creating samples from scratch as opposed to finding them. I still do that. But the aim now is how can I create this myself, and make it my own. I’m focusing on that, sonically,” said the American artist.
This new approach to songwriting was immediately apparent on “Silver and Gold,” which he produced in collaboration with R&B artist Pink Sweats and pop-rock musician Sam Fischer. The track is danceable and joyful, flourished with energetic beats, horns and claps.
“The beat has been done for a while. But we did the sample, chopped it, and recorded the vocals … It didn’t really click until we started writing the hook. And then we were like, ‘This is actually pretty cool. We love this,’” he said of the single, whose release, quite fittingly, coincided with the Summer Olympic season.
Excerpts from the interview:
How important is social media in your career?
It’s cool seeing now just how different music promotion is. It’s not really about word of mouth anymore. It’s almost all about socials now, which can be a blessing and a curse. You see all these people—despite the lockdown—having opportunities to have huge spikes in their careers while doing everything from home. I love watching that progression.
How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect your creative process? We had to work fast. A lot of people are on time constraints. It’s tough but there are definitely ways we can pivot ourselves … It was a fun process.
But also, the lockdown allowed me to work at my own pace as well … It gave me the time to just sit there, nitpick, be OC about every track and make them perfect in my mind. It felt a lot less rushed, and I think I was able to capitalize on my time.
How did you get into vaporwave or Japanese city pop?
That was my first introduction to producing. I stumbled upon it around the time city pop was beginning to get noticed by people. I started in 2014. I felt it was just something recommended to me by accident on YouTube, on the sidebar, and it turned out to be one of my favorite music genres … My favorites are Anri and Tatsuro Yamashita.
I have always loved different elements of it, it has this almost classic disco sound, but a little more jazzy, warmer and happier … I have always felt there’s always this sweet spot in city pop. I love taking elements and drawing inspiration from the way they use instruments, phrase chords and write songs.
Does city pop still figure heavily in your newer works?
Not as heavily now. I want to create my own sound. There are so many samples there that are very hard to touch now, because everyone else has used them. But I would love to go out there and find some obscure ones.
Do you enjoy scouring for new samples?
Even on days where I’m not really focusing on sampling, it’s one of the things I just do instinctively because it’s so fun … one of the things that brings me a lot of happiness. It’s rewarding when you find and hear a good one.
What else do you hope to accomplish in the future?
I would really love to find a way to get with legacy acts like The Doobie Brothers and other acts I grew up listening to. I would love to work with the original disco and funk artists from the 1970s and ’80s.