OOOUUU

Album: Herstory (2016)
Charted: 19
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Songfacts®:

  • Young M.A is an MC from Brooklyn, New York, whose performing name stands for "Me Always." After years of dropping freestyles onto YouTube, she broke out with this club banger where she rhymes about the reality of life in her native borough.
  • Young M.A. wrote in a Genius attribution about the titular phrase:

    "I've been saying 'OOOUUU' for a year—we've just been randomly saying it. Me and the bros will be like, 'OOOUUU,' and at first I wasn't going to name the song this. When I recorded the track and was saying 'OOOUUU' on it, I listened to it and was like, "I'mma just call it 'OOOUUU.'" And then people will be like, 'What the hell is O-O-O-U-U-U?!' People thought it stands for something."
  • The beat was supplied by NY Bangers, whose other credits include Nicki Minaj's "The Pinkprint Freestyle." Young M.A. said:

    "When I first heard the beat and wrote to it, I said to myself, 'This is one of those records where I just wanna relax.' There's not too much thinking about the bars or the punchlines, I needed a feel good record. I didn't have one of those yet, I was putting so much work into my pen. This is a record where I just wanted to be cool on the track. I'm chill, I'm humble a lot, I needed one of those records.

    When I went to record the track, I wanted to be drunk while I recorded it. I was really smizz and drizz when I recorded the record so it feels authentic."
  • The song samples the yells from Melvin van Peebles' 1972 track "The Eight Day Week."
  • When this climbed to #8 on the October 22, 2016 Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, it marked the first time that a female rapper had reached the Top 10 on the tally in 2016 as a lead act. Missy Elliott was the previous female emcee to reach the Top 10 of that particular Billboard listing as a lead, with "WTF (Where They From)," back in December 2015.
  • You call her Stephanie? I call her Headphanie.

    M.A explained to Billboard magazine the lyric is a metaphor and there isn't a real Stephanie. "You don't have to be named 'Stephanie' to be a Stephanie," she said. "It's just basically a girl that's real slutty and doing a lot of inappropriate things."

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