The Story Behind The Sample: How Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion created 'WAP'

‘WAP’, the highly successful track by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, is controversial, to say the least. While the track received a lot of backlash upon its release in 2020, some music critics hailed it as a feminist masterpiece. ‘WAP’, which is an acronym for ‘Wet A** P*ssy’, polarised the music industry as fans debated what it stood for and what it was promoting, but in this article, we are going to delve deeper and look into the origin of its infamous sample “There’s Some Wh*res in This House”.

The story behind this sample begins 31 years ago in the city of Baltimore when radio personality Frank Ski stumbled upon a hit with his track ‘Doo Doo Brown’, a comedic song that thrust Baltimore breakbeat club music into the American limelight. Ski had worked on the track with a man named Stanley Evans Jr., who worked at Warlock Records, an underground label operating on America’s East Coast and under the moniker 2 Hyped Brothers and a Dog; they set out to release an album.

While working on their album Ya Rollin’ Doo Doo, Evans called upon one of his colleagues from Warlock Records for help. This colleague was a man named Al ‘T’ McLaran.

Whilst working together, McLaran and Ski formed a friendship and decided to go into business, starting a new label, ‘Deco Records’. From here, they began to release 12-inch singles of new club tracks, and as a sequel to the album cut ‘Greeks in The House’ as a follow-up, we got a new song.

The sample used in the instrumental for ‘WAP’ comes from the song ‘Wh*res in This House,’ a Baltimore club music classic by DJ and radio personality Frank Ski. Released in 1992, although Frank Ski produced the beat, the vocalist who delivered the now iconic line was Al ‘T’ McLaran. 

McLaran heard the news that he had been sampled through his daughter, he revealed in an interview with Vulture Magazine. In the interview, he detailed the moment he found out, recalling, “My daughter sent me a link”, facetiously declaring, “She’s so proud that her daddy has such a strong connection with the wh*res of the world.”

McLaran explained that the original song combined elements from two hot tracks in local clubs at the time. Runaway Slaves’ hit ‘Booty Mission (Yo, Yo Where the Ho’s At?)’ and Zone’s single ‘Ghosties’. The latter contained a sample from R Dean Taylor’s ‘There’s a Ghost In My House’. All of these, according to McLaran, culminated in ‘Wh*res in This House’.

The musician even continued to admit he didn’t believe the song would do well until he saw some local kids react to it. He recalled: “We played it in a parking lot that night, and some kids heard it. They lost their minds and started dancing like fools. I figured, what the hell, it might work after all.”

Despite the fact that McLaran is the vocalist of the song, he was not actually credited upon its initial release in 1992 and isn’t credited as a writer on ‘WAP’, although Frank Ski (real name Frank Rodriguez) is. Despite the fact that over the years, Ski and McLaran have had their disagreements about the credit, McLaran put it to rest and closed off the interview by saying, “Big shout-out to Frank; thank you, Cardi B. I love you both. Cut the cheque!”

Listen to both songs, below.