Valentino Khan's "Pump"

About

"Pump" is a bass house song by producer Valentino Khan and released by Mad Decent in 2017. Since its initial release, the song has garnered popularity through Musical.ly and TikTok with the #PumpLikeThat challenge. Later, advertisements for the video game Mafia City, which featured the song, inspired a series of video parodies.

Origin

On May 26th, 2017, American producer Valentino Khan released the song "Pump" through the record label Mad Decent. Since its release, the song has received more than 10 million views on the official audio upload on YouTube (shown below), more than 17 million Spotify plays,^[1] more than 2 million plays on Soundcloud, ^[2] and more than 3 million and over 140,000 views on two explicit music videos for the song.

Spread

On the social media app Musical.ly, "Pump" was utilized in a social media challenge known as #PumpLikeThat (sometimes known as #PopLikeThat), which gained traction sometime before May 2018, where users freeze their face as they bounce their phone to the beat of the song, often rotating the phone around their head while keeping their face still. In May 2018, compilation videos of these challenges began appearing up on YouTube (shown below).

Mafia City

"Pump" has also seen a surge in popularity in late 2018 and early 2019 due to its use in advertisements for the mobile strategy game Mafia City. On January 1st, 2019, YouTuber Averroes published a video compilation of the advertisements, some of which use "Pump." The video received more than 2 million views in less than two weeks (shown below).

The ads have been subject to parody remixes that often use the song. These parodies typically use the "Lvl 35 Boss" advert style, where a "Lvl 1 Crook" is seen gaining a large amount of money to become a "Lvl 35 Boss," though at times the "Lvl 100 Boss" rank is used as well (examples below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References