We did the digging to find out what songs were the first to use these terms and which ones popularized them. As more words get introduced, we add them here. Some recent additions include "Catfish," "Thirsty," and "Woke."
When I want you as my friend
an email to you they will send
saying that you have a friend request on Facebook
Popularized by: Brad Paisley in "Facebook Friends" (2013)
Back when Facebook was still an exclusive social club for college kids, the Miami University Cheezies, an all-male a cappella group, sang about their devotion to the site in "Facebook Song," set to the tune of the Everly Brothers' "Dream." Little did they know, they were crooning about a soon-to-be bygone era after the network would expose its antics to everybody and their grandmother... literally.
Brad Paisley's ode to "Facebook Friends" is a cautionary tale about two old flames about to rekindle. The problem is, they are both married to other people and when their online affair turns into an offline one, they could lose everything. She's "got a husband and a minivan. And this was not a part of the plan." The thing about Facebook friends is that they can show up without warning and leave just as quickly. Just as the woman is fantasizing about being with her high school sweetheart forever, he deletes his profile.
Lucky for that guy, she wasn't a part of Knife Party's crew. In 2011's "Internet Friends," the Australian duo promises "You blocked me on Facebook, and now you're going to die." But I guess with a name like Knife Party, you wouldn't expect sunshine and Candy Crush games.
Bugaboo
First Used by: Ed O.G. and Da Bulldogs in "Bug-A-Boo" (1991)Now this is the meanin' of a Bug-A-Boo
It's a person who's constantly BUGGIN' YOU
Popularized by: Destiny's Child in "Bug A Boo" (2006)
Legend has it that a bugaboo is a boogeyman used by parents to terrorize their children into good behavior. When Red Nichols and His Five Pennies sang about a "Bugaboo" in 1930, it was about an ominous feeling you couldn't shake (on the plus side, it made you wanna dance). Modern definitions call it a persistent fear that causes anxiety. Ed O.G. and Da Bulldogs smashed all of these explanations together and defined a bugaboo as "a person that constantly wants to be around you," someone whose presence fills you with dread. They're at the end of every phone call and on the other side of every door. They're the first to show up, uninvited, and the last to leave. In the most popular song on the subject, the bugaboos are relentless admirers who won't take a hint. They're even more powerful now that the Internet has thrown the doors of communication wide open. Destiny's Child sings in "Bug-A-Boo":
I wanna put your number on the call block
Have AOL make my emails stop
'Cuz you a bug a boo
Gangsta
First Used by: William DeVaughn in "Be Thankful for What You Got" (1972)Diamond in the back, sunroof top
diggin' the scene with a gangsta lean
Popularized by: Snoop Dogg in "Gangsta Luv" (2009)
There are subtle differences between a gangster and a gangsta, particularly since the term became adopted by the Hip-Hop community. The former is more Al Capone, the latter is less a profession than a personality trait.
In musical terms, gangsta is best known as a rap genre, typically concerned with themes of violence and crime, but the first time we heard it was in a song about gratitude. William DeVaughn released his sumptuous funk song "Be Thankful for What You Got" in 1972, almost a decade before the rise of hip hop, and 20 years before "Gangsta Rap" took hold. This led to a bevy of Gangsta scenarios: we had "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta" (Geto Boys), "Gangsta's Paradise" (Coolio), and even a little "Gangsta Lovin'" (Eve).
Bromance
First Used by: Tim Berg in "Seek Bromance" (2010)Popularized by: Ryan Higa feat. Chester See in "Bromance" (2012)
Bromance
Shouldn't be ashamed or hide it
I love you in the most heterosexual way
A combination of "brother" and "romance," a bromance is a non-sexual relationship between two guys who are, by all appearances, close enough to have one. As Chester See put it, it's like "Eminem and Dr. Dre, if I loved you more I might be gay."
The word entered the vernacular so quietly that its origin is still being disputed. Some sources claim it was coined in the early '90s when Dave Carnie, editor of the skateboarding magazine Big Brother, used it to describe skate-buddies. Others point to the Broism Dictionary from Transworld SURF Magazine as proof that the word comes from surfer slang.
Several artists were inspired by the broism, including Tim Berg ("Seek Bromance"), Pulled Apart by Horses ("Bromance Ain't Dead") and In Search of Mercy ("Rad Bromance"), but one of the most memorable songs about a bromantic pairing didn't actually mention the word. On the TV show Scrubs, JD and Turk express their feelings for each other in "Guy Love." They sing about "being closer than the average man and wife," yet it's sometimes easier to hide "than explain our guy love, that's all it is. Guy love: he's mine, I'm his. There's nothing gay about it in our eyes."
Saving whales, crowded jails
America On Line, Internet, E-mail
But I'll be right here loving you
Popularized by: Britney Spears in "E-Mail My Heart" (1999), J-Shin feat. T-Pain in "Send Me an Email" (2006)
"Twelve months ago, I never would have predicted that Internet usage would become completely mainstream by November 1999," marveled an E-Commerce Times writer. Back then, email was full of chain letters and desperate pleas from Nigerian princes who needed your help to reclaim their fortunes. It was also, apparently, a hub for the hearts of young pop stars. A year after Rhett Akins promised to "be right here lovin' you" despite all the general ruckus going on in the world, Britney Spears crooned "Email me back and say our love will stay alive," in "E-Mail My Heart" from her smash debut album ...Baby One More Time.
J-Shin's girlfriend took a cue from Brit and tried to win him back through a heartfelt email in "Send Me an Email." With outdated references to MySpace, a throwback to AOL's "You've got mail" alert and lyrics like "this ain't nothin' to L-O-L about," the 2006 song could just as well be "Send Me a Telegram" for how much it will make sense to young listeners in a few more years.
Stunt
First Used by: Kid 'n Play in "Brother Man Get Hip" (1988)Stop frontin' and stuntin'
Boy, you know you just better
Popularized by: 50 Cent and G-Unit "Stunt 101" (2003)
Before rappers adopted the word, a stunt was something performed by daredevils like Evel Knievel or even The Fonz (who inspired the phrase "jumping the shark" after a feat of ridiculousness involving water skis and a shark on Happy Days) - a flashy spectacle to dazzle onlookers. As a kid, you were sometimes accused of pulling a stunt after some amateur wrongdoing - like piling pillows at the bottom of the staircase and taking a flying leap from the top: "Don't pull a stunt like that again!"
Either way, it's an attention-seeking act.
In rap, it's not much different, except a stunt becomes a verb that describes a show-off attitude. It's not about performance, it's about swagger. While Kid 'n Play told his enemy to stop "frontin' and stuntin'," 50 Cent and G-Unit taught a class on the subject in "Stunt 101," where eye-catching bling and flashy cars were the requirements for graduation. Lately, students of the old "Stunt 101" school are proving their stunting skills. Macklemore is "stuntin' and flossin'" while Kendrick Lamar is "stuntin' hard like a black circus." Even 50 Cent, nearly a decade later in "Put Ya Hands Up," still raps: "All I do is this. Stunt when I want."
Frenemies
First Used by: New Radicals in "You Get What You Give" (1998)Frenemies, who when you're down ain't your friend
Every night we smash their Mercedes-Benz
Popularized by: Jim Jones in "Frenemies" (2009)
New radicals were a short-lived project of lead singer Gregg Alexander, lasting just two years from 1997 to 1999. Their musical legacy rests on their one wonderous hit, but their contribution to the English language has been far more lasting.
The song is crammed with memorable lyrics, notably the biblical echoes of the title "you get what you give" and the declaration "you've got the music in you." However, even more notable is in the second verse when Alexander warns us against "frenemies, who when you're down ain't your friend."
"Frenemy" is a portmanteau of the nouns "friend" and "enemy." The words are by logical definition antonyms, but Alexander's paradox highlights the complex nuances at work in relationships. In this context, a frenemy is someone who is only your friend when it is convenient. A frienemy can also be thought of as someone with who is both your friend and a rival. (In its most innocent form, think of the competitive songwriting partnership of Lennon and McCartney. For a more devastating interpretation of the term, think of Disney's The Fox and the Hound, whose titular characters are best buds until the hound gets a taste for fox hunting).
The neologism does allow for a far more malicious relationship; a "frenemy" can also be thought of as someone who uses a friendship for an ulterior motive, ultimately leading to betrayal. This is a common dramatic device in movie and theatre. Perhaps the most infamous frenemy is Iago, from Shakespeare's Othello. He pretends to be Othello's friend only to (spoiler alert!) ensure the tragic hero's demise. Who would have thought a '90s pop hit would provide such a useful tool for literary analysis?
Ice
First Used by: Ethel Merman in "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" (1949)Get that ice
Or else no dice
Popularized by: Gucci Mane in "Icy" (2005)
The gangstas took a cue from the gangsters on this one. Prohibition-era Chicago was a stomping ground for fast-talking, hard-bitten criminals who also had a linguistic gift for spinning ordinary words into homicidal euphemisms. For example, you wouldn't want to find yourself in a "Chicago overcoat," which was street slang for a coffin.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary blog, "ice" hit the Windy City even earlier, when the first goon squad started their racket in 1896. Ice was no longer just frozen water, but a slang word for diamonds (or death threats: "Put 'em on ice"), inspiring crime novel banter and Broadway tunes like the original rendition of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." There are plenty of rappers who use ice to imply how cool they are (Ice-T and Ice Cube), but others use the word - and it's frigid counterparts like "frost" and "frostbit" - to describe their diamond-encrusted jewelry and blinged-out clothes.
In "Thrift Shop" Macklemore rapped: "I'm just pumped, I bought some sh-t from a thrift shop. Ice on the fringe, it's so damn frosty," while in "Icy," Gucci Mane brags about the rocks on his chain and watch and the "ice in my ear, or in my bracelet." Again in "Jewelry," Mane wears "so much ice it make ya eyesight blurry." The OED finally figured the connotation was not going away and included diamonds as an informal definition for ice in its 2012 edition. And of course, Vanilla Ice won't be forgotten, but the chill tag in his moniker was inspired by his signature breakdance move called "The Ice," not by a penchant for precious stones.
Scrub
First Used (And Popularized) by: TLC in "No Scrubs" (1999)A scrub is a guy who thinks he's fly
And is also known as a buster
Always talkin' about what he wants
And just sits on his broke ass
The traditional definition of scrub - to vigorously wipe away dirt and filth - had been used in countless songs before TLC gave the word a creative twist in their Grammy Award-winning hit "No Scrubs." These "busters" were jobless nobodies who wouldn't take no for an answer and were no better than the grime that needed to be washed away.
Kandi Burruss, songwriter and future Real Housewives of Atlanta star, was driving when she freestyled the famous opening.
The hip-hop group Sporty Thievz shot back at the trio with the parody "No Pigeons," about lazy girls who will use a guy for rides and free drinks:
Cause I don't want no Pigeons
Them be them girls who gets no dubs from me
Playin' the bar dumb broke with her best friend's coat
Tryin' to holler at me
Although a few rappers like Gucci Mane and Snoop Dogg have resurrected the word in 20th-century Rap - in Mane's "Volume" and Snoop's "10 Lil' Cripps" - none has equalled the impact of TLC's "No Scrubs."
Hater
First Used by: L'il Kim in Puff Daddy's "It's All About the Benjamins" (1997)All that bullsh-t you kick
Playa hatin' from the sideline
Popularized by: Ice-T in "Don't Hate the Playa" (1999), Jay-Z feat. Kanye West in "Hate" (2009)
"Hater" floated around in hip-hop songs for a few years before the Internet took notice. Ice-T called out his haters in "Don't Hate the Playa" in 1999: "All you haters out there actin' like a brother done did somethin' wrong 'cause he got his game tight," while the group 3LW blasted them in "Playas Gon' Play" the following year: "The playas gon' play, them haters gonna hate, them callers gonna call, them ballers gonna ball." LOX even dedicated an entire song to haters in the scathing "F--k You." Still, The Urban Dictionary didn't define the word until 2003:
"A person that simply cannot be happy for another person's success. Instead of giving acknowledgment in courtesy, a hater often pursues his/her point by exposing a flaw in the target subject. Hating, the result of being a hater, is not exactly jealousy. The hater doesn't really want to be the person he or she hates, rather the hater wants to knock someone else down a notch."
As hip-hop has become more and more about rappers flaunting their wealth and status, there are almost as many songs about haters as there are haters. Lil Wayne can "hear you talkin' hater but you ain't sayin nothin," while J. Cole's "Blow Up" is "a song for my haters, yeah, you got me feeling like the greatest."
Rihanna's advice in "Dem Haters" is to simply cut them out: "Get dem haters out your circle, smile in your face but all they wanna do is bring ya down." Of course, that's after you publicly compare a photo of said hater to a photo of a goat, like Rihanna did in 2013. Then you can ignore them.
Kanye West prefers to be a hater-baiter. In "Bring Me Down," he laments: "There'll always be haters, that's the way it is, hater ni--as marry hater bitches and have hater kids." He teamed up with Jay-Z in 2009 for "Hate," where the rappers question why they're hated in the first place because they made themselves so easy to love. But in the end, you're not really loved until you're hated, or something like that:
You can't fade us, you hate us
I need you, stay there
I breath you, like air
Turn myself in then, beat the case for it then
Turn around and put "I really did it" on my Twitter
Popularized by: Chris Brown feat. K-Mac in "Twitter (Follow Me)" (2009)
2009 was a big year for Twitter in music, starting with Slaughterhouse's "Killaz," followed by Trey Songz's "LOL :-)" just a couple weeks later. For Trey, it was just another bit of jargon in a song that's mostly about sexting ("twitter me a picture," "Go to my page and follow, and if you got a body like a Coke bottle"), but Slaughterhouse made a prescient point about what should be common sense on social media: don't post anything you wouldn't want your boss or, in this case, the police to see. Plenty of people didn't heed the warning and are still regularly canned and locked up for posting their inappropriate or unlawful actions for all the world to see.
In Chris Brown's "Twitter" song, he compared the number of women he could get to his number of followers. That number is now over 13 million - minus one for when Rihanna unfollowed him after he called her an "old bitch" in "Way Too Cold" - who are entertained by his famous rants about important topics like the legal system, "rap ni--as" and Perez Hilton. I guess someone isn't a Slaughterhouse fan.
Twerk
First Used by: DJ Jubilee in "Do the Jubilee All" (1993)Twerk, baby, twerk, twerk, twerk
Popularized by: Beyoncé in "Check On It" (2005)
Dip it, pop it, twerk it, stop it, check on me tonight.
Miley Cyrus' butt (2013)
It was only recently that we needed a word to describe a style of dance where you bend over and pop your rump up and down. "Twerk" dates back to the early '90s, when the dance became a big part of the bounce music scene in New Orleans. Since then it has been a part of the hip-hop dictionary with mentions by 2 Chainz ("Used 2"), Lil Jon and Friends ("Get Low") and T.I. ("Like I Do").
It was only in 2013, however, that the word was added to the Oxford Dictionary, following Miley Cyrus' provocative performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. Over the next few weeks, the adventures of Miley's posterior made news as a distraction from stories of congressional follies and natural disasters. The upshot was an alarming repetition of "Twerk" across all media. (Note that Cyrus doesn't have any songs about twerking.)
The Oxford dictionary's decision to recognize the term once it became associated with a skinny white girl certainly makes a statement about cultural appropriation.
Heavy Metal
First Used by: Steppenwolf in "Born To Be Wild (1968)I like smoke and lightning
Heavy metal thunder
Popularized by: Don Felder in "Heavy Metal (Takin' a Ride)" (1981)
There are so many sub-genres of metal music, from death to thrash, from gothic to nu, that it's amazing to think that the genre has only really existed for about fifty years. You would think that a disc jockey or journalist came up with the term in an attempt to describe the unprecedented work of Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, but the phrase originated in a Steppenwolf song about bikers.
It really is the ideal descriptor for this brand of music: two perfectly balanced words that sound downright ominous when you say them together. Chevy could have used it for the name of a truck (introducing the 2014 Heavy Metal... now with more towing power).
In literature, the term can be tracked back to William Burroughs (the man who provided Steely Dan's moniker) in 1961 when he described a character in his novel The Soft Machine as "the Heavy Metal Kid." Hollywood didn't apply it to film until 1981, when the campy animated movie Heavy Metal hit theaters with a soundtrack featuring Nazareth, Blue Öyster Cult and Sammy Hagar.
Bling
First Used by: R. Kelly in "Back to the Hood of Things" (1993)We going back to the hood of things
Got to get my bling-bling.
Popularized by: B.G. in "Bling-Bling" (1999)
Bling is the aural embodiment of shiny jewelry - a staple of hip-hop lyrics. The term entered the Oxford English dictionary in 2006 once the word started showing up in pop songs like "Most Girls" by Pink ("Most girls want a man with the bling bling...") and "Gone" by Jack Johnson ("Cars and phones and diamond rings, bling bling - those are only removable things").
It was around this time when rappers abandoned the term, completely disowning it in 2008 when Mitt Romney said it on the campaign trail. Fat Joe even addressed the subject, explaining that the term is officially passé.
Thirsty
First Used by: Soulja Boy in "She Thirsty" (2007)She Like My Swag (She Thirsty)
She Like My Hair Cut (She Thirsty)
She Like My Smile (She Thirsty)
She Want Me Wifyed Up (She Thirsty)
Popularized by: Missy Elliott in "Ching-A-Ling" (2008)
In 2003, The Urban Dictionary introduced a new pair of definitions for the word "thirsty":
1. Too eager to get something (especially play)
2. Desperate
The slang made the leap to music four years later when Soulja Boy released "She Thirsty" on his debut album, Soulja Boy Tell 'Em, and rapped about a woman who wanted his bod. Missy Elliott followed suit in her 2008 hit "Ching-A-Ling." Bragging about her sexual prowess, the rapper claims she's got the goods to quench any guy's thirst, but she's actually the one who's parched. As the night winds down at the club, she raps a carnal invitation in the hook:
Thirsty, baby bring it over here
See my money maker, do my money maker
But the modern definition of thirsty boils down to a desperate need to satisfy a desire, which isn't always sexual. In Mariah Carey's 2014 track "Thirsty," the singer is fed up with a fame-hungry ex whose chose his ego over their relationship. She puts him on blast in the lyrics, singing:
You used to be Mr. All About We (right)
Now you're just thirsty for celebrity (right)
In 2017, The New York Times described the disparaging adjective as "a graceless need for approval, affection or attention, one so raw that it creeps people out." One of the popular attention-seeking methods is posting "thirst trap" selfies on social media, which involves flaunting your body for validation. Mariah's guy uses this tactic, but snaps his possessions instead of his physique to portray himself as being wealthier than he is:
That Bel-Air wood sign calling you again
So you stunting on your Instagram
Said she don't know what got inside this child's mind, she planted
A box of condoms on her dresser then she Instagrammed it
Popularized by: Beyonce in "Yonce/Partition" (2014)
In the years following its 2010 debut, Instagram became a popular reference in hip-hop songs, with rappers bragging about their 'Gramworthy physiques and whose DMs they were sliding into. But its first use by Nas was less about flexing and more about warning. His 2012 single "Daughters" is a cautionary tale about raising girls in the era of social media. Earlier that year, the rapper was caught off guard when his 17-year-old daughter snapped a photo of a box of condoms and posted it online, which made him realize his parenting skills were too lax.
Two years later, Beyonce sang about Instagram on her hit two-parter "Yoncé/Partition," noting the permanence of photos posted on the internet, including a cake-by-the-pound (aka booty snap) of her that makes its way around the club.
And every girl in here got to look me up and down
All on Instagram, cake by the pound
Circulate the image every time I come around
Outside of the hip-hop/R&B realm, other artists also fell under the spell of Instagram, with Ed Sheeran stalking his ex's profile on "New Man," and Florida Georgia Line scaling back on social media in favor of a simpler life on "Simple." The country duo sang about letting go of the pressure to curate an Instagram-approved life after finding something worth living for:
We used to live on Instagram
Worry 'bout who all gives a damn
'Bout where we've been and where we ended up
Then I met you and you met me
And all the rest is history
Catfish
First Used by: Chamillionaire in "Here We Go Again" (2013)Your whole life's a catfish and you do not exist
Popularized by: Skepta in "Skepta's Interlude" (2017)
Back in 2007, Brad Paisley released the single "Online," which cast him as an overweight, basement-dwelling nerd who pretended to be a GQ model online to impress women. A few years later, a documentary inspired a name for the duplicitous practice: catfishing.
In Nev Schulman's Catfish, the filmmaker documents his Facebook relationship with a fellow 20-something who turns out to be a married middle-aged woman. Her husband tries to make sense of the situation by comparing his wife to the catfish that were supposedly shipped with live cod to keep the sluggish fish active to maintain their freshness. People who are catfish in life, he says, are those who "keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh."
The film, and its spinoff MTV series of the same name, introduced a catfish as someone who creates a fake online persona to lure an unsuspecting victim into a romance for their own gain.
Catfishing became a hot topic in hip-hop, with Chamillionaire being one of the first artists to rap about it on his 2013 track "Here We Go Again." The "Ridin" hitmaker takes aim at people he once trusted who turned out to be backstabbers. In the scathing final verse, he labels them as phonies and drives the point home with the final line: "Your whole life's a catfish and you do not exist."
The term really took off in hip-hop in 2017 after it was used on Drake's More Life mixtape via Skepta's guest track "Skepta's Interlude." The UK grime artist has a surefire method of dealing with posers online: "Block that account, it's a catfish."
Later that year, Cardi B used the term as an insult to her two-faced haters when she rapped on Migos' Top 10 hit "MotorSport":
These hoes ain't what they say they are
And they pussy stink, they catfishin' (Stank)
Post Malone followed up with "Same Bitches" in 2018, where he was tired of the LA catfish that use tricks to make their bodies look better on social media ("Always post selfies on the 'Gram from a angle, a Catfish").
In T-Pain's "Goat Talk," rapper Lil Wayne talks himself up as one of the "Greatest Of All Time" and slams the copycatfish that try to emulate his style: "But you look like Wayne, you sound like Wayne, we gettin' catfished?"
Meanwhile, Doja Cat is certain that catfish are swimming around Bebe Rexha's man in "Baby, I'm Jealous." In her guest verse on the 2020 track, which finds Rexha feeling insecure after scoping out the girls her boyfriend follows on social media, Doja shares her suspicions:
That chick, can't be that chick
Baby, I'm a bad bitch
If he fiendin', he'll prolly get a catfish
Or maybe that chick is really Brad Paisley!
Woke
First Used (And Popularized) by: Georgia Anne Muldrow in Erykah Badu's "Master Teacher" (2008)I stay woke
Long before the social-justice term "woke" gained steam during the Black Lives Matter movement - with the hashtag #staywoke sweeping social media - it was already well-known in African American communities. In 1962, Harlem author William Melvin Kelley introduced it in his New York Times essay "If You're Woke You Dig It," after hearing the word on the streets. It took a little longer to reach the music realm.
In 2008, soul singer Georgia Anne Muldrow uttered the refrain "I stay woke" in Erykah Badu's "Master Teacher," a song Muldrow wrote a few years earlier but never released. The song imagines what society would look like for Black people in the absence of their exhaustive struggle against racism.
Although the word has since been used as a catch-all rallying cry to raise awareness of discrimination and injustice, woke is rooted in the Black experience. Muldrow told OKPlayer that being woke is "understanding what your ancestors went through. Just being in touch with the struggle that our people have gone through here and understanding we've been fighting since the very day we touched down here. There was no year where the fight wasn't going down."
Childish Gambino used the word in a romantic context in his 2016 single "Redbone." Paranoid about his girlfriend's infidelity, he warns her to "stay woke" to guard herself against the attentions of other men so she won't be tempted to cheat.
Meek Mill and Royce da 5'9 both released songs titled "Stay Woke" in 2018, with Mill rapping about systemic racism and the broken criminal justice system ("The odds against you and they double stacked, stay woke"), and Royce recalling the rocky path to sobriety (with guest vocalist Ashley Sorrell singing, "I'm invincible, you're sleepin' on me, I'ma stay woke").
In Kendrick Lamar's 2022 hit "N95" - a scathing critique on American culture in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic - the rapper is disgusted by people's obsessions with status symbols and their penchant for insincerely adopting political ideologies to boost their public images. "Take off the fake woke," he raps.
Muldrow was also frustrated by the fakers. "Most people who are woke ain't calling themselves woke. Most people who are woke are agonizing inside," she said. "They're too busy being depressed to call themselves woke."
January 23, 2014
Updated August 25, 2022
Additional writing by Richard Law
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