About Black Beatles (feat. Gucci Mane)

"Black Beatles" is a song by American hip hop duo Rae Sremmurd. It was released on September 13, 2016, by EarDrummers and Interscope Records as the third single from their second studio album SremmLife 2. The song features guest vocals from American rapper Gucci Mane and is produced by Mike Will Made It. Following viral exposure, due in large part to its role in the Mannequin Challenge trend, it became both Rae Sremmurd's and Gucci Mane's first number-one single on both the US Billboard Hot 100 and the New Zealand Official New Zealand Music Chart as well as their first top ten appearances in countries such as Australia, Canada, and the UK.

The song was one of the last tracks recorded for SremmLife 2 and was a major reason for the album's delay from its planned June release date. Musically, "Black Beatles" is a hip hop and trap song with lo-fi production. Andrew Unterberger of Billboard stated that "Black Beatles" is "a vital, quintessentially youthful song, which is extremely welcome in this oncoming era of social conservatism. Though both brothers Khalif 'Swae Lee' Brown and Aaquil 'Slim Jxmmi' Brown are now of legal voting age, as an entity Rae Sremmurd remains decidedly new-wave, part of Atlanta's bumper crop of young MCs who are less concerned with paying fealty to hip-hop history than they are with blowing out the genre's formalistic constraints to their own thrilling, individualistic ends. Which isn't to say that the Chainsmokers and Halsey were stodgy and back-to-basics, either -- 'Closer' was, in some ways, a blockbusting song in its own right—but after 12 weeks, any song becomes Establishment. Change was needed, and change was delivered." He also stated that while "'Black Beatles' is certainly not an explicitly political song, and the duo might understandably roll their eyes at any reading of their now-signature hit that suggests that it is," he praised the duo for the group's tribute to the Beatles and their ability to subvert expectations of the status quo.