Culture 10/22/2026

Producer tags that took over TikTok

A few producer tags have outlived their beats on TikTok: one named the Renegade dance, another turned a mumbled “plug” into a meme. Here is how they got there, told by the producers.

By VTG Staff

7 minute read

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In November 2019, Reazy Renegade’s younger cousins started texting him. “Wasn’t this you? It’s called the Renegade Dance.” The Miami producer had made the beat for K Camp’s “Lottery” in New York that spring, in one session while Camp was on tour, and it opens with his tag: “Renegade, renegade” (play: Reazy Renegade’s tag at the top of K Camp’s “Lottery”). A teenager had made up a dance to the song, and the dance had taken its name from his tag. “I’m grateful for the fact this is the first time a producer’s tag has become the name of a dance,” he told Revolt in February 2020. “That’s an accolade for me, personally.”^[1]

“Lottery” became the first sound on TikTok to be used in 20 million videos, and its title was later changed to “Lottery (Renegade)” because so many people already knew it by the tag.^[2]

A producer tag is the short recorded signature a beatmaker puts on a track, usually in the first seconds. A TikTok sound is a short clip of a song that people reuse under their own videos, and when the clip includes the tag, the tag goes with it. Below are the tags that made that trip, from a Miami producer’s name to a mumbled “plug” and a shout Kendrick Lamar ended up performing at the Super Bowl, plus two that spread on Twitter and Instagram before TikTok. For the tags hip-hop knew first, see hip-hop’s greatest producer tags.

“Renegade” · Reazy Renegade

A crowd of young dancers in streetwear posing against a grey wall behind the word LOTTERY in large yellow letters, with K Camp’s name above it

The dance came from Jalaiah Harmon, a 14-year-old choreographer who first posted it on Dubsmash in September 2019. Bigger TikTok accounts, Charli D’Amelio’s among them, spread their own versions without naming her, and Harmon got her credit only after The New York Times told her story in February 2020. That month she danced it at the NBA All-Star Game.^[2]

By then the producer and the rapper had learned who she was. K Camp’s first reaction, Reazy said, was “I’m going to find her, and figure out how we can do this and bring her to light.” Neither of them had pushed the song on the app. “There was no marketing put into it blowing up on TikTok,” he said. “That happened organically.”^[1]

Before TikTok

Tags were meme material before the app existed. Future’s deadpan “If Young Metro don’t trust you,” which Metro Boomin adopted as his tag, became a Twitter joke format in 2015 and 2016, with users pasting it over photos. Kanye West put the line on “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” in February 2016, and two weeks later Drake tweeted his own version, which drew more than 62,000 retweets.^[3]

In 2018 a producer’s name went viral with a dance. Drake opens “In My Feelings” with “Trap, TrapMoneyBenny” (play: Drake, “In My Feelings,” opening line), the name of its producer, a beatmaker from Mentor, Ohio, who had first sent beats to Drake’s team about five years earlier; that June the team asked him for the stems of one of them. He told only his manager. “The opening line is my name and I’m like ‘whoa,’” he said later on the web series Pensado’s Place. Then the comedian Shiggy posted himself dancing to the song on Instagram, and the dance turned into a challenge while the song spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.^[4]^[5]

Three women posing outside a New Orleans T-shirt shop with sale signs in the window, under the title In My Feelings in yellow script

“Pluh” · BeatPluggz

Rich The Kid in sunglasses and a black Gucci T-shirt, rapping into a handheld microphone on an outdoor stage — Rich The Kid at the Openair Frauenfeld festival in Switzerland on July 13, 2019. His 2015 single “Plug” carried the BeatPluggz tag to a wide audience.Photo: Frank Schwichtenberg/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped

The BeatPluggz tag is a single word, and not quite a word at that. In 2015 the producer MexikoDro and his BeatPluggz collective started tagging beats with a voice saying “plug,” slang for a dealer, pronounced closer to “pluh.” An early use that reached millions was Rich The Kid’s “Plug” (play: Rich The Kid, “Plug,” feat. Kodak Black and Playboi Carti, prod. MexikoDro), with Kodak Black and Playboi Carti, which premiered on WorldStarHipHop’s YouTube channel in December 2015.^[6]

In a 2018 podcast clip, the BeatPluggz rapper Corey Lingo said the voice belonged to the producer BeatPluggTwo, who had recorded “beat plug” on his own microphone before MexikoDro cut it down to “plug.” By then, Lingo said, other producers were adding the tag to beats BeatPluggz never made, “because they think it give them like clout points.”^[7]^[6]

The sound gave its name to a style of rap, pluggnb, and then got a second life as a joke. The YouTuber Fulcrum started repeating it in his videos in 2022, and by mid-2023 TikTok users were dropping “pluh” into suggestive audio clips as a punch line, with single videos passing 800,000 plays.^[6]

2022: the year tags became sounds

In March 2022 a TikTok user paired the opening of Playboi Carti’s “New Tank” with its producer’s tag, “Wake up, F1lthy” (play: F1lthy’s tag, “Wake up, F1lthy”), and the sound was used in more than 25,000 videos within two months, Know Your Meme counted. We tell that story in our guide to rage music’s producer tags.^[8]

That August, TikTok found a tag written for laughs. DJ Smokey, a Montreal producer who came up making Memphis rap-inspired beats on SoundCloud, had put a voice saying “Legalize nuclear bombs” on a song by the rapper Joeyy, and a sequel, “Call the fire department, we just nuked the building,” followed it onto the app about a week later.^[9]

Smokey told Rolling Stone he had taken a two-year break before the “nuke” tags, which he built on a phrase two Montreal friends used, and that the TikTok run is what restarted his career. His “Shadow Wizard Money Gang” drop, named after a Montreal collective he works with, went viral on the app more than once. He doesn’t use TikTok himself: he once tried to make an account and decided it wasn’t for him. “I miss Vine.”^[10]

People started DMing me. Yo, this thing’s all over TikTok. And it was surprising and exciting, but I don’t know, I don’t even have a TikTok.

DJ Smokey to Rolling Stone, April 2025^[10]

“MUSTAAARD” · Mustard and Kendrick Lamar

Mustard in a snakeskin-print jacket and a diamond chain on a red carpet in front of an iHeartRadio Music Awards backdrop — Mustard at the iHeartRadio Music Awards in Los Angeles on March 14, 2019.Photo: Glenn Francis/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped

In late 2024 a tag became a meme because a rapper answered it. Kendrick Lamar released GNX on Nov. 22, 2024. About two minutes into “tv off,” Mustard’s tag plays and Lamar answers it with a drawn-out “Mustard!” (play: Kendrick Lamar, “tv off,” Mustard’s tag and the shout). Within two days people on X were captioning pictures of screaming cartoon characters with it, and TikTok users were lip-syncing it; one sketch passed 3.8 million plays in its first two days.^[11]

Brands piled in within days, from McDonald’s to the Minions and Shrek accounts, Uproxx reported. Mustard, who also produced Lamar’s No. 1 hit “Not Like Us,” told Billboard: “I’ve been literally trying to get a song with him for years.”^[12]

On Feb. 9, 2025, Lamar closed the Super Bowl LIX halftime show in New Orleans with “tv off,” and Mustard walked out to join him.^[13]

How we chose

We included tags whose spread on TikTok, or on social media before it, is documented with dates by a named outlet or by Know Your Meme’s dated entries, and we preferred the producers’ own accounts. Know Your Meme is community-edited, so its play counts are its own snapshots. We left out “Young Fly on the Track,” which went viral in 2021, because the tag contains a racial slur, and we could not document a TikTok trend for some well-known tags, including Rick Ross’s “Maybach Music.”

Most of these tags are a word or two that people can say out loud, like “Renegade” and “plug.” The producers did not plan the trends: Reazy Renegade put no marketing behind “Lottery,” and DJ Smokey does not use the app. Credit did not always follow the sound either. A dance Jalaiah Harmon created took its name from a producer’s tag, and by 2018 Corey Lingo was complaining that other producers put the BeatPluggz tag on beats BeatPluggz never made.

Reazy took a lesson from it anyway. “It blowing up on TikTok was a revelation,” he said. “It showed you don’t have to do it the normal way to blow up a song.”^[1]