Megan Thee Stallion took “Hot Girl Summer” from a catchphrase to a lifestyle this summer, and now she’s cashing in. The Texas rapper recently filed a trademark application for the phrase, and in a new interview with Allure, she explained why it was important for her to have legal ownership of it.
“I really didn’t even know that it was gonna catch on how it did. It was just me talking shit, telling everybody I was gonna be me for the summer, and they should be them too, like as free as they can be,” she said. “When I saw Wendy’s and Forever 21 saying, ‘Hey, are you having a Hot Girl Summer?’ I was like, ‘Hell no, Forever 21, you’re going to have to pay me.’ But I just wanted to get it trademarked because it’s me. It’s my thing.”
Megan even turned “Hot Girl Summer” into a song featuring Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla $ign, which peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Produced by The Bone Collector, Crazy Mike, and Juicy J, it became the highest-charting hit of Megan’s career thus far.
In addition to brands jumping on the trend, other artists did, too. blackbear released a song titled “Hot Girl Bummer” shortly after Megan’s song, although he claimed in a Genius Verified interview that it wasn’t directly inspired by her track.
“The Meg the Stallion song came out a couple days after I actually recorded the song, but at the same time that song has nothing to do with that movement or thing like that,” he said. “I just kept seeing captions and I just made a song about the captions I was seeing. So she obviously had an impact on all of culture.”
Catch up on all the lyrics to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” on Genius now.
