Pop quiz question: what connects Rihanna’s “What's My Name”, DJ Snake’s “Let Me Love You”, Akon’s “Right Now”, Iyaz’s “Replay” and Beyonce’s “Drunk in Love”? The rookie answer is that they were all chart hits released in the 2010s. But for top marks, we needed this: they all contain the same refrain. A phrase so simple, it’s almost comical. It means absolutely nothing, it’s insanely catchy, and it goes like this: “Na, na, na!”

This has been on a lot of our minds recently, thanks to a recent viral Instagram post from 2000spophits. “Y’all remember this!?” nostalgia-baits the caption, before proposing a hypothesis: “In the 2010s, we couldn't escape the ‘nana’ in every song.” The video boasts more receipts than a greedy MP; it reels through dozens of songs, all using a version of the same “na-na-na” that we went bananas for. “It’s a phrase that sticks with you and isn’t easy to forget,” says Andres Estrada, curator of the platform.

Anyone who is old enough to remember watching 4Music, clubbing at Popworld and downing WKDs during the 2010s will doubtless remember this “na-na-na” era. “I was at university during the very beginning of this trend, so I remember it from bad club nights in Brighton and then from moving back to London and playing pop songs in my kitchen with friends,” says eminent pop writer Alim Kheraj. “It’s one of those things, however, that you don’t really notice until you see all the examples back to back.”

So why have we suddenly clocked it now? Well, 2010s pop is very much on the mind and already enjoying a kind of renaissance. It’s thanks to the rise of discourse surrounding “recession pop” – a revived descriptor for the upbeat, party-hard, nihilistic sound that dominated music around the time of the Great Recession. With the world now suffering from the ceaseless turmoil of a never-ending permacrisis, we’re pressing play on these playlists – featuring the likes of Katy Perry, Pitbull, The Black Eyed Peas and, gulp, LMFAO – all over again. “We’re seeing a lot of songs that were big a decade or so ago blow up on TikTok, partly because that era was all about hedonism and the club. It was escapism,” Kheraj says. OG recession pop artists are bringing this back (have a listen to Kesha’s “Joyride”) but more current artists are also adopting the same IDGAF attitude (namely the biggest record of the last year, Charli xcx’s Brat).

But why, back in the 2010s, couldn’t pop producers refrain from throwing in a cheeky “na-na-na” wherever they could? Matt Squire – a veteran producer who worked with the likes of Ariana Grande, One Direction, 3OH!3, Charli xcx and Katy Perry in the 2010s – explains that it was actually used to inject some edge. “There’s an attitude to it, a punk rockness, which is the reason it showed up in so much pop. It’s really natural for somebody to gravitate towards that refrain versus ‘ooh’ or something whimsical,” says Squire.

He remembers it being a major label ploy. “It was strategic. They were looking for a silver bullet refrain. [Hooks for] Taylor Swift were too polite with what we were trying to do with Rihanna, where you wanted sex appeal and edge and attitude.” He personally used this approach when working on the final boss of “na-na-na” songs: One Direction’s “Na Na Na”. “It was how can we do something super catchy and super easy but speaks to a different kind of boy band,” he explains.

Kheraj believes that the “na-na-na” was pushed on us by the usual culprits. “This was the era of those big songwriting camps, where Rihanna’s team would fly a dozen writers somewhere to make hits for an album and then only a handful of those songs would get made,” he says. “I imagine that some of the people incorporating these ‘na-nas’ into their songs are likely responsible, or were closely involved with, the ‘na-nas’ in other songs. Part of me also suspects that this could be a quirk of Swedish pop songwriting.” It’s true that prolific Scandi hit machines like Max Martin and Stargate did lead the trend, riffing off ABBA’s use of simple songwriting to transcend language barriers and make learning the words even easier (special shoutout to legendary US vocal producer Kuk Harrell, too, who worked on ‘na-na-na’ hits “What’s My Name?”, “I’m Into You” and “Boyfriend”).

There was never a time in history when there wasn’t an easily chantable thing that unites us in prayer or ritual. It’s a simple language trick… it’s a command

But where there was an edge, there was also extreme simplicity. “I think it’s perhaps one of those songwriting techniques that people use to pad things out when they’re either trying to come up with lyrics or when trying to create memorable bits in songs that people can recognise and sing along to without having to learn the lyrics,” Kheraj says. In this sense, it’s a bit like the barrage of tunes featuring the word “yeah” after The Beatles’ She Loves You (and the spin-off yeyé genre in France) way back in the 60s. The more repetitive and symmetrical a melody is, the catchier it is – and “na-na-na” hits all these touchpoints.

It makes sense that it happened when it did, too. The launch of Spotify (2008) and Instagram (2010) meant that previews and snippets of new songs had to cut through the noise. “If you can get people in eight seconds on TikTok, then you’ve got them, and you can actually build a career off of it,” Squire says, recalling Ariana Grande having “thousands” of drafts loaded up ready to release online at any given moment. But he also thinks this trick is as old as time itself, positioning the “na-na-na” as a type of primal scream. “There was never a time in history when there wasn’t an easily chantable thing that unites us in prayer or ritual,” he says. “It’s a simple language trick… it’s a command.”

Maybe we need this human unity more than ever; a pure bit of pop magic to make the disillusionment disappear for a hot second. “People crave pop music that isn’t bogged down with hidden messages, meaning, subtext, meta narratives or discourse. People want bangers about going to the club and being a slag,” Kheraj says. Squire echoes this. “People want attitude without angst and the music reflects it; 2010s pop had a really unique way of combining a bit of anger and ice with escapism.”

But while retro “na-na-na” refrains still reverberate online, do they remain in the contemporary producer’s toolkit? Definitely not on the same level. Kheraj thinks that today, we’re searching for something with a little more substance. “I think songwriters and pop stars are chasing viral lyrics that can be utilised as sounds on TikTok and go viral. It’s about snappy, memeable lyrics, rather than distinctive sounds that break through on radio and lodge in your head.” In other words, “I’m so Julia” is more zeitgeisty than the “ah-ah-aaah” refrain that follows it in Charli xcx’s 360.

But “na-na-na” isn’t completely dead and buried; Peggy Gou, for example, gave it a club twist for (It Goes Like) Nanana, her 2023 crossover hit. Addison Rae fans will note that the popstar de jour’s debut album opener, New York, essentially scrunches the title into a “na-na-na”. Estrada, the “na-na-na” aficionado, cites more examples over the last couple of years. “I’ve noticed that some artists such as Doechii (Alter Ego), Tate McRae (Means I Care) and Sabrina Carpenter (Coincidence) are bringing ‘na-na’ back to us. So there’s definitely a video coming soon for the 2020s edition,” he says.

None of these tunes, though, it should be noted, were huge hits with mainstream appeal. We have ultimately escaped the “na-na in every song” that was genuinely omnipresent in 2010s pop. Now, it’s more of a secondary, not-so-secret weapon, rather than the locked-and-loaded “silver bullet” it once was. But, while we’re still high on the nostalgia trip, don’t be shocked if those three little words make a reappearance in a major banger one day soon – and get you hooked all over again.