While many people will remember what they were doing when they heard that David Bowie had died, far fewer will be able to say that this also happened to be the day on which they started work on what would turn out to be one of the slickest hip-hop/funk songs of the last 10 years.
Anderson .Paak is someone who has that honour, though, for it was on 10 January 2016 that he came up with the initial idea for Dang!, a song that he would eventually record with the late Mac Miller.
.Paak made the revelation on the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepherd podcast. “We did that song, I think, the day that David Bowie died,” he confirmed. “And we were just all, like, bummed out. And I was like, I feel like that was like the second or third, like, legend we had lost. And I was like, ‘Man, I can't keep on losing you over complications.’ You know, I was just like, it just kind of flowed.”
This, as you may know, is the first line from Dang!’s chorus, and .Paak recorded it that very day.
“We were like, in this random studio - I don't even think it was a studio studio, it was just like an office space - and we just started writing that, and I laid it down, I just laid the chorus, and a few months later, I got hit up by by Mac through Twitter.”
Miller had got to know .Paak’s work through his recent work with Dr Dre (he appeared on six tracks on Dre’s 2015 soundtrack album, Compton), and soon suggested that they too should collaborate.
“He was like, ‘Yo, I would love to work with you if, even if you have stuff that's, you know, ideas, anything like that. You could send it my way,’” .Paak remembers. “And I was like, ‘cool’. But, yeah, I had just did that song, Dang!, or just the chorus of it. And I was like, ‘Pomo [Dang!’s producer] - you think we should send him this?’ And, you know, he was like, cool. And I sent him a few joints, and that was the first one he gravitated towards. He's like, ‘this is the one’. And he sat with it for like, a couple weeks and sent it back. He had his verse. He had put horns on it, and that's when I realised, ‘Oh, he's like, a producer, too. He's a real musician.’”
Dang! was released on 28 July 2016 as the first single from Miller’s fourth album, The Divine Feminine. Speaking to Genius shortly afterwards, Miller would confirm that “Anderson wrote this song for people who passed away,” a sentiment made all the more poignant by the fact that he died from an accidental drug overdose just two years later.
Miller did get to perform Dang! with .Paak, though, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on 15 September 2016 (look out for Jon Batiste, who can be spotted on the Fender Rhodes).
Miller also sang it with then-girlfriend Ariana Grande at the One Love Manchester concert on 4 June 2017, a benefit gig that was organised by Grande in light of the horrific bombing at her Manchester Arena concert just two weeks prior.
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