‘Like a G6 billion streams’ is a phrase that would have sounded like science fiction back in 2010, when Far East Movement’s electro-hop track was still a novelty blasting out of every club speaker in America. Now the song has crossed that threshold on Spotify, cementing a cultural moment that was already, historically, something rather extraordinary.
Produced by the Cataracs and featuring vocals from Dev, ‘Like a G6’ was the lead single from Far East Movement’s third studio album Free Wired. Its hook, performed by Dev, was lifted from her earlier track ‘Booty Bounce’, also written and produced by the Cataracs. The chorus, ‘Poppin bottles in the ice, like a blizzard / When we drink we do it right, gettin’ slizard / Sippin sizzurp in my ride, like Three 6 / Now I’m feelin’ so fly like a G6′, worked on multiple registers at once: hedonistic party anthem, hip-hop reference collage, and something genuinely new in the landscape of American pop.
A Title That Came Before the Plane Existed
The title itself has a backstory that, in retrospect, reveals a good deal about the song’s relationship to aspiration. In 2010, Far East Movement member Kev Nish told MTV: ‘A G6 is not a Gatorade flavor. It’s not a car, convertible, four-door. It’s not a watch. But Drake talks about having G4 pilots on deck, so we said, “What’s flyer than a G4?” Of course, it would be a G6.’ Nish was referencing Drake’s 2009 cut ‘Forever’, in which Drake bragged about knowing G4 pilots on a first-name basis. What nobody involved could have anticipated was that a G6 airliner would not actually be introduced until 2016, meaning the song was chasing an aircraft that did not yet exist. There is something fittingly surreal about that.
The Cataracs’ production wove in another intertextual thread: the lyric about ‘sippin sizzurp’ nods directly to ‘Sippin’ On Some Syrup’, the 2000 single from Memphis group Three 6 Mafia. Kev Nish, in a separate interview, framed the song’s origins rather more prosaically: ‘People ask us “what’s your inspiration?” and it’s just partying in a pool house, and in the club of course, DJs are a huge inspiration to us.’ That tension between the grandiose and the mundane is part of what makes the track hold up.
Like a G6 Billion Streams: The Chart History Behind the Number
‘Like a G6’ peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for three non-consecutive weeks, and its place in the charts carries a weight beyond any single sales figure. According to Spotify, Far East Movement became the first Asian American group to reach number one on the Billboard Charts, a milestone that reframes the track’s success as something more than a viral party record. It was also the first number-one single by any artist of East Asian origin since Kyu Sakamoto’s 1963 single ‘Sukiyaki’, a gap of nearly half a century that underscores just how marginal Asian and Asian-American artists had remained in the upper reaches of mainstream American pop.
Hearing it now, the song sits in an interesting place historically. It arrived at the precise intersection of electronic dance music’s crossover into American mainstream radio and the early age of streaming’s growth, when a track’s reach was still being measured primarily in downloads and airplay. That it has since accumulated one billion Spotify streams reflects how completely the metrics shifted beneath it.
There is also something worth sitting with in how the song was constructed from borrowings and references, layers of prior art built into its DNA: Dev’s hook from her own catalogue, the Three 6 Mafia nod, the Drake counter-move. In that sense ‘Like a G6’ is a record very much of its moment, the early 2010s habit of building tracks that were knowing about their own indebtedness. Few of those records, though, turned out to carry this kind of cultural freight, or to find an audience still listening to them on Billboard‘s charts platform and beyond, more than a decade later.
Far East Movement’s music is available on vinyl and CD via uDiscover Music.
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