Why The Song In Uber Eats' Super Bowl 2022 Commercial Sounds So Familiar
The pandemic has been rough for a lot of businesses, but certainly not all. For one, the fast food business has been booming. In turn, so have food delivery apps, which have trended upward right along with fast food restaurants, by putting "all" the fast food menus at your disposal, then going to the restaurant to pick up your selection, then delivering it to you. Just like you never realized you always wanted. But the cleverest of them all thus far may be Uber, whose Uber Eats food delivery app was ready and waiting to pick up the slack for the company when people stopped going anywhere during various periods of lockdown.
Although we can't know if Uber actually intended Uber Eats to be the pandemic business interruption insurance that it has become, what's clear is that Uber is a pioneer. Therefore, it seemed a little surprising that when Uber selected the soundtrack for its Uber Eats Super Bowl 2022 television commercial, it went with a song derived from a rather ubiquitous TikTok sound that will have many viewers thinking, "Oh no, oh no, oh no no no they didn't."
Alternately attributed to hip hop artists Kreepa and Capone, who both sampled the "Oh No" earworm refrain for their tracks of the same name, TikTokers have uploaded millions of videos set to the hook. But even beyond the popular app, there is yet another reason why the song from the Uber Eats Super Bowl 2022 commercial sounds familiar.
The vintage song behind the Uber Eats Super Bowl Commercial
To make it into the Tik Tok "sound" pantheon, a song must be "catchy" and "evoke a feeling," according to the Pelham Examiner. The "Oh No" sound, with its repetition of the words "Oh no, oh no, oh no no no no" in a helium-high adult-talking-baby-talk voice, nicely fits the bill as a backdrop to all manner of TikTok hilarity, from misbehaving mutts to bad haircuts to parking garage snafus. So then of course it makes sense as a soundscape for the Uber Eats Super Bowl LVI ad, which features Jennifer Coolidge, Gwyneth Paltrow, Trevor Noah, and more, struggling to make sense of a world in which Uber Eats is delivering stuff you dare not "eats," including, respectively, lipstick, vagina-scented candles, and lightbulbs.
Now, if you don't happen to watch TikTok videos, you may still be familiar with the song from the Uber Eats Super Bowl commercial. That's because the song from which it derives has generated sample-driven hits for various artists for the last 57 years (via UDiscoverMusic). All of the "oh no" clips ultimately come from The Shangri-Las' 1964 hit, "Remember (Walking in the Sand)," which itself peaked at number 5 on Billboard's Hot 100. The minor-key close-harmony depicts a bereft teenager mourning that their summer romance has gone the way of summer, which is to say, gone. But thanks to TikTok, the various artists it inspired, and now, Uber Eats, the track, like the season, will return predictably.