When it comes to keeping up with the latest songs, sometimes people take note of the ones that they hate as much as the ones that they love. One such song that has seen this sort of disapproval is “Anxiety”, written by professional rapper and singer Doechii. This song has been trashed constantly on social media and is often the source of frustration when it plays on the radio. To understand the hatred for this song, we must look at the melody that it samples.
The sample used throughout the entire song is from the popular hit “Somebody That I Used to Know”. The song was released back in 2011 by Gotye and has been a favorite among millennials and Gen Z. It’s a bittersweet song that retells the accounts of a broken relationship and the feeling of being left behind.
Using the song’s melody as the sample was a mistake. The song is simply too iconic to be matched up with. Everyone recognizes the melody and immediately links it to the song. It gets listeners excited when they hear the first few seconds on the radio, only to be rug-pulled when they realize it’s “Anxiety”. It doesn’t help that the high-pitched vocals can be somewhat grating to hear when you were expecting something smoother and more somber. The song isn’t terrible, but it’s not as great as “Somebody That I Used to Know”, so it leaves people to see Doechii’s song as an inferior version.
Again, even though this song isn’t my cup of tea, I would say that it isn’t all that bad by itself. It just picked the wrong song to sample, which eventually rubbed many people the wrong way.
