Rae Sremmurd’s monumental Gucci Mane-assisted 2016 hit “Black Beatles” has joined the exclusive Billions Club on YouTube, which celebrates videos that have eclipsed more than one billion views on the platform.
The song was featured on the band’s wildly celebrated album, SremmLife 2.
The Mississippi duo of siblings Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi spoke about the track in a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone. During the conversation, Swae went into the origins of the song: “Mike Will had made a bunch of beats—his latest batch—and then I heard that beat. I was like, ‘Yo, that beat is so crazy.’
As for how Gucci Mane got on the track, he said, “Mike Will was in the studio with Gucci Mane—as soon as Gucci Mane was out [of jail], they was cooking up ‘Cause they go way back. So Mike Will said [to Gucci], ‘Lemme play this join from Rae Sremmurd.’ Gucci said, ‘Man, I rock with them young boys.’ Boom—he laid his verse down. It’s like we had a complete band. ‘Black Beatles.’ It barely made our album.”
The song was made popular in part by the mannequin challenge that became associated with it, a trend that even saw Paul McCartney as a participant.
Jxmmi spoke about that, saying: “So I was on my tour bus, and I woke up and check my Twitter, and everybody was hitting me up with ‘Paul McCartney did the Mannequin Challenge!’ I’m like ‘What song did he play?’ That was the first thing I was thinking!”
He also shared his opinion on The Beatles. He said: “We always liked their tunes; the whole movement, their style. But that’s just one reference that came to mind. In a lot of [our] songs, we try to sound like heavy metal. Just loud. We have a lot of music with rock & roll references. And we live our lifestyles like rock stars.”
