Big Acts Who Have Soaked Up Sunshine Pop
From Beyoncé to Cypress Hill, these genre-spanning artists have sampled, referenced, or reshaped sunshine pop’s bright melodies and shadowy undertones.
Although sunshine pop’s heyday was over by the early 1970s, the genre’s influence has lingered. Here are five acts—impish punk rockers, ingenious pop stars, electronic adventurers, and hip-hop collectives—that have drawn on these songs over the decades, in some cases sampling them outright or borrowing a specific sound, such as a bass line or verse.
This roundup appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal. SUBSCRIBE
Beyoncé
The multi-hyphenate Grammy winner is known for threading myriad historical references into her variegated songs. In “Ya Ya,” her 2024 ode to Black musician lineages, Beyoncé sampled the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” in the refrain and the Wrecking Crew’s hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” performed by Nancy Sinatra. The choices were significant. Both songs were released shortly after the 1965 abolition of Jim Crow laws that had forced visionary Black artists to seek alternative ways of reaching audiences—such as through the venue network known as the Chitlin’ Circuit (also the name of Beyoncé’s world tour).
Madonna
Madonna is credited with popularizing the cone bra and ushering in an early-2000s disco renaissance, but she’s also hell-bent on bringing back the 1966 Mamas & the Papas hit “The ‘In’ Crowd.” She has sampled it on three songs: “Amazing” (2000), from her electro-country Music era; “Beautiful Stranger” (1999), written for the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack; and remixes of her club standard “Ray of Light” (1998)—a testament to its versatility.
Circle Jerks
On their third studio record, Golden Shower of Hits (1983), L.A. hardcore punk rockers Circle Jerks were frank about the music biz: The album cover depicts gold records shoved into a urinal. For the title track, the band culled six songs from the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, including the Association’s “Along Comes Mary,” weaving a bitingly satirical tune about the industry. The cheeky pop song functions as a time capsule, ironically immortalizing the moment when sunshine pop—itself a reaction to changing times—became a potent-enough medium to provoke daring conversations.
Cypress Hill
When piecing together the textured instrumentals that would support their blustery 1993 banger “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That,” California hip-hop collective Cypress Hill drew from an unlikely well: the rhythm section undergirding Harry Nilsson’s “Rainmaker.” On its face, the experimental pop crooner’s 1968 song about drought-stricken Kansas has little to do with a chest-puffing number about putting up your dukes. But the muscular musicianship within this sunshine pop ditty lends a surging propulsion to Cypress Hill’s uncompromising song when sped up and set to a thrumming bass line.
Four Tet
In 2003, the British electronic producer Kieran Hebden, who performs as Four Tet, plucked a sunshine pop sleeper, the Peppermint Rainbow’s 1969 “Sierra (Chasin’ My Dream),” to flesh out the hook for his shimmering nine-minute opus “Unspoken.” The guitar-drenched pop tune, written by the short-lived Baltimore band, builds Hebden’s plaintive piano balladry into an emotional crescendo that’s breathtaking in scale and depth. It’s the perfect second life, in other words, for an old song about the pain of leaving a person, or a place, that will always stay with you.
Paula Mejía is a Colombian American writer and editor from Houston. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, GQ, the Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and other publications. She teaches graduate arts writing at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and lives in Los Angeles.
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