‘I’m swaggin’, I’m surfin’: the staying power of the sports anthem loved by Obama, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift

IIt wasn’t a day at the beach when the Kansas City Chiefs hosted the Miami Dolphins last month, with temperatures at Arrowhead Stadium dropping to -4F, causing frostbite. The only thaw came late in the playoff game when the Fast Life Yungstaz (FLY) song Swag Surfin’ filled Arrowhead.

The rap song, a jock jam du jour that will likely get a lot of attention on Super Bowl Sunday, starts off slow and brassy — but as soon as the beat dropped, a rave began as the 71,492 attendees swayed and belted out in unison. “I’m swaggin’, I’m surfin’,” goes the sports jingle, “I’m clean as dish soap.”

Partying along with the crowd (albeit from a luxury suite), Taylor Swift was caught by TV cameras and quickly turned into internet fodder. “I was on social media and the video popped up on my timeline in real time,” says rapper Ea$ton, who is featured on Swag Surfin’. “It’s hard not to move when the song starts, even if you don’t know what it is.”

Swag Surfin’ is hip-hop’s plucky locomotive, a single that gains steam every year. It’s the pride and joy of FLY, the rap trio consisting of lifelong friends Myko McFly, Vee and Mook. Swag Surfin’ debuted in 2009 on their album Jamboree, hitting the Billboard Hot 100 on their way to achieving gold certification. It fits right in with line dances like the Electric Slide and the Cupid Shuffle in the tradition of cheerful Black expression.

But it’s staying power, not sales, that sets Swag Surfin’ apart. The song has evolved from a southern club banger to a wedding song; it was performed by Beyoncé at Coachella and featured during Barack Obama’s fashion week at the White House and New York. “There are many artists who never have a hit at all,” says Mook. “Because we have a hit that has only gotten bigger over time, all I can say is that we are blessed.”

It’s a success story from an earlier technological era, one that began on the fringes of Atlanta’s hip-hop music scene in Stone Mountain, Georgia—the suburb best known for its Mount Rushmore-rivaling Confederate monument. The trio, who still make music, formed their group as high school students and regularly collaborated with a group that Ea $ton (formerly Jit-Lee) put together, the Band Geakz. FLY began working on Jamboree in 2008, a time when there was still pressure to provide rap songs with a corresponding mold that could appeal to the YouTube algorithm. (Think Soulja Boy’s Crank That or GS Boyz’s Stanky Legg.) “But we were actually trying to avoid that,” says Mook.

Swag Surfin’ belongs to a subgenre of hip-hop called futuristic swag, a mix of trap and snap music that also includes rock elements, but it took some effort for the sound to become unique to FLY. Myko found the beat for Swag Surfin’ on MySpace and negotiated with a 19-year-old KE on the Track (who would later produce Rick Ross, Future and Tamar Braxton) to lease the instrumental for $75. “My friend took me to Walmart or Publix and I sent KE a Western Union,” Myko recalls. “That was what he wanted at the time.”

They recorded Swag Surfin’ in a two-bedroom apartment owned by Mook’s uncle, sitting on the floor writing their fun rhymes, taking turns in a makeshift recording booth in a closet. Vee’s uncle was the one who suggested wrapping the song with a groovy left-to-right dip-sway, a dance that was already popular in Atlanta. FLY knew they had a hit on their hands from the moment they started performing the song in local clubs in the summer of 2009. “A few weeks later we started seeing people dressing like us,” says Vee, who bills himself as a “Ralph Lauren mascot” on the song. “It actually happened at a good time, right before everyone went back to college to spread the word.”

Once the song hit physical mixtapes, Swag Surfin’ made its way from Atlanta to the network of historically black colleges in the Southeast — where school marching bands adopted the song to perform at sporting events, before predominantly white schools like Auburn adopted it made. the song is a regular part of their in-game entertainment. But even as the song grew in popularity, FLY worried it could fall off at any moment. They remember green-rooming in a club before an early out-of-town gig when Swag Surfin’ came over the speakers, except when someone else was rapping on the track. That’s when they realized they had to fully own the beat if they wanted to continue riding the wave.

“The thing about leasing is that a hundred people can lease one beat,” Vee says. “So we had a situation where we had to buy the beat from (another tenant) And buy the beat from (KE) as soon as we were ready to hit the radio and get a mix and master version done. And while the group hasn’t said how much that costs, they admit it’s the best money they’ve ever spent.

The music video, meanwhile, shows the dance, which quickly spread to professional sports arenas. Mook calls out Kansas City’s linebacker Willie Gay for rushing the Chiefs’ event staff to play Swag Surfin’ in their regular season finale to fuel their championship campaign. At the time, Swift was barely caught in a luxury suite in Arrowhead, vibrating to the song with a drink in hand. “I want to say that since I’ve been here, it’s been a big moment in the fourth quarter, a big drive in the game for our defense,” Travis Kelce explained on his New Heights podcast. “They play a highlight video with Swag Surfin’ on it, and everyone gets really excited about it.”

But in the Dolphins game, Swift went all out in the biggest viral moment yet for FLY. In the conference championship game two weeks later, players from the Baltimore Ravens broke into the dance to troll Swift and the Chiefs after scoring an early touchdown. Since the exchange, USA Today and other media have made efforts to clarify the dance for those who may have wondered why she didn’t make letters with her arms to the Village People. “She was excited and just having a lot of fun,” Ea$ton said, as the group noted how smoothly she rode the wave.

“If she got on track here,” Mook says, imitating Swift as she sweeps a hand over her head in time, “it reminds us of the trendsetters we’ve been over the past fifteen years.”