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North Carolina A&T alum mixes old and new music to create mashups rappers love
Arnett Heathington’s viral success on TikTok and YouTube leads to one of his creations being performed during Megan Thee Stallion’s tour
As Grammy-winning rapper Megan Thee Stallion travels from city to city on her “Hot Girl Summer Tour,” she is performing a mashup combining her hit “Gift & a Curse” with R&B singer Keith Sweat’s “Right and a Wrong Way” at multiple stops, thanks to North Carolina A&T State University graduate Arnett Heathington.
Heathington, 25, created the multigenerational mix, which has received more than 950,000 views on TikTok and 10 million on YouTube, in January 2023 in his childhood bedroom in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.
Megan Thee Stallion pfirst performed the mashup two months later at the AT&T Block Party in her hometown of Houston.
“A stranger sent me a message on Instagram telling me that Megan was performing the song right now,” Heathington said. “I didn’t even know this person and then they sent me a screen recording from AT&T’s livestream of the event. I also had a few friends in the audience that recorded it live on their phones.”
Heathington started teaching himself how to produce music in 2019. He began to take his craft seriously in 2020 once the coronavirus pandemic forced him to take online classes and stay confined to his college apartment.
Heathington and his roommates listened to albums for hours, and light bulbs would consistently go off in his mind about songs that could possibly jell together. In 2021, he began mashing up and mixing hits from across the decades.
“I feel like I was experiencing a Pharrell [Williams] or a Kanye [West] in their early days,” Heathington’s college roommate Samuel Folaranmi said. “I’m just grateful to be a part of the experience.”
Arnett Heathington
The Los Angeles native enrolled in his first piano lesson at 5 years old. During his childhood, his Sierra Leonean mother also found him a violin teacher and conducted singing lessons with Heathington at home.
“It’s really helped me to hone my ear,” Heathington said. “I can tell when something is wrong and it helps me to be that much more clean in my production.”
Heathington’s family moved to Upper Marlboro in 2009. He stuck with the violin through 12th grade, when he constantly auditioned for the band at school and made first chair. Heathington said he enjoyed learning key and time signatures and takes pride in knowing how to read music.
While studying history at North Carolina A&T, Heathington said, he experienced a “musical revelation” after being introduced to music from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and songs deemed Black classics he had never heard before.
Being a former church choir performer himself, Heathington drifted toward members of the university’s gospel choir and talked about gospel playlists with them in exchange for introducing them to different sounds from his hometown. Heathington also began to listen to DJ sets at campus parties, seeing how crowds reacted to certain songs and analyzing why DJs chose their song order.
Heathington’s original setup consisted of a laptop with a broken screen connected to his television with a HDMI cord and a free trial of producing software from FL Studio. He began experimenting with stock sounds but with versions of the software costing from $99-$499, as a struggling college student Heathington had to make do.
“I watched him finesse that original setup he had,” Folaranmi said. “It really speaks to his dedication. The fact that he didn’t see that as an obstacle really showed me that the love for the music was there, and it’s like as a friend how can I not support that.”
Heathington released his first mashup, which blended rapper Young Dolph’s “Rain Rain” and SWV’s 1998 hit “Rain,” in April 2022 on TikTok. The mashup, which received 61,000 views, would be the beginning of a spike in followers and subscribers for the musician on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
“I saw a couple of people that were doing it on TikTok, and honestly I just felt like I could do it better than them,” Heathington said. “I started coming up with different things that I thought would fit. When I do a mashup, I want it to make sense.”
Heathington’s first viral mix, which blended Beyoncé’s “Check On It” and New Orleans bounce music, now has more than 730,000 views on TikTok. The mix is used on TikTok as background music for everything from videos of digital influencers restocking items in their homes to videos of simulating sensory content to dance challenges.
Professional makeup artist turned social influencer Jackie Aina also used Heathington’s Beyoncé mix on one of her viral grocery restock videos, attracting 3.8 million views.
“I always expected Arnett to blow up,” Heathington’s childhood best friend Efeohe Suleman said. “It was just a matter of time, and I just feel like it had to get into the right spaces with the right people. Everything now it’s just aligning properly.”
Rapper Flo Milli was the first celebrity to acknowledge Heathington’s work, for his mashup of her song “Hottie” with rapper Nicki Minaj’s “Check It Out.” Rappers Sexxy Red, Offset, Latto and 2Rare also have interacted with Heathington’s music on various social channels.
However, Heathington said Megan Thee Stallion’s acknowledgment meant the most to him.
A month before Megan Thee Stallion performed the young producer’s mashup in Houston, DJ Esentrik’s mashup of Beyoncé’s song “Cuff It” and rapper Twista’s 2009 hit “Wetter” went viral on TikTok. Beyoncé then released the mashup with Esentrik’s help with new vocals and chords.
Around the time of Heathington’s and Esentrik’s viral mashups, TikTok announced that more than 150 million Americans use the app. More than 1 billion videos are viewed on the app daily, according to Social Champ, a social media management tool.
With so many eyes on TikTok, Heathington said, he believes it will be the breeding ground for a new generation of producers.
While trying to navigate his digital audience, Heathington said he believes creators on Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter, have to rely on followers and mutual users to repost their work, while on TikTok, the “For You” page helps reach the masses.
“To me, TikTok is the ultimate social media,” Heathington said. “You can post something right now and in an hour it could have 200,000 likes.”
As the Megan Thee Stallion and Sweat mashup began to gain traction on YouTube, Heathington lost his ability to earn money from ads on the global site because the songs being used to create the mixes were not his original works.
A YouTube video with 10 million views like Hetherington’s can earn the creator from $25,000-$300,000 depending on the advertisements the site inserts into the video. Before he was demonetized, he earned roughly $1,000 from YouTube, he said.
TikTok has even stricter policies on copyright infringement and content deemed “unoriginal,” which has kept Heathington from starting the process to earn money on the app by joining the Creator Fund.
Heathington is an audiovisual support assistant for the World Bank by day and relies on that salary for his daily expenses, but he said the money he is missing out on from his social channels will come back to him once he begins releasing original songs.
“His authenticity is what is going to take him far. He pours his art and soul into figuring out what sounds good and what doesn’t,” Suleman said. “He loves it and he looks at producing his best work as a form of self-love, and I think people can feel that emotion.”
Heathington plans to release an album featuring a mix of R&B, hip-hop and rap with tracks he has produced, original rapping and singing with a few features at the end of the summer.
“Honestly, the time is now,” Heathington said. “My mashups have brought millions of eyes to other people’s music, and it’s time for me to do that for myself. Right now, it’s being meticulously crafted for everyone’s enjoyment.”