The trend of sampling colossal songs to repurpose them into EDM or pop hits has seen a modest resurgence in recent years. Bebe Rexha and David Guetta scored a massive hit in 2022 with Eiffel 65’s emblematic track, while Troye Sivan turned this fad into something somewhat cool with ‘Got Me Started’ and its ‘Shooting Stars’ sample. Yet, we all know the undisputed king of this game is, and will remain, Pitbull.
In his new album, titled ‘PITCOIN’, the Cuban-American artist proves that time does not pass for him. Pitbull stays living in 2012 because that’s what he does best. Everything in ‘PITCOIN’ harks back to that sweet era, from the collaborators (Enrique Iglesias!; Jason Derulo!) to the very sound of the tracks, which hasn’t aged a single bit. The rest of us mortals live in a world full of uncertainty, despair, and injustice. Pitbull keeps the party going.
Is the result endearing or ill-timed? It’s both, but if the artist already crowned himself in the early 2010s by turning ‘Macarena’, ‘Take On Me’, or the ‘Lambada’, with Jennifer Lopez, into modern massive hits, on ‘PITCOIN’ he attempts to repeat the feat. It doesn’t land, but the ambition is something else. Aside from Pitbull, absolutely no one would release an LP like this in full 2026. And rightly so.
The album opens with ‘Reach For The Stars’ in grand fashion, as Pitbull samples one of KISS’s most iconic anthems, ‘Rock And Roll All Nite’. The sample is so pervasive that it’s barely a pop song anymore; it’s practically a rock song with a Pitbull verse. His lack of self-awareness shines brightly when he mentions Elon Musk, not to critique him or anything, but to declare that he’s “on his way to Mars.”
The next track, on the other hand, is a display of unapologetic honesty on Pitbull’s part, simply from its title: ‘Damn I Love Miami’. The track originally appeared in 2020 and already sounded dated. Nobody knows why it’s here. The same goes for the song ‘Tremenda Salsita’. Indeed, it’s a salsa tune, direct and blatantly influenced by ‘Baile Inolvidable’. Yet Bad Bunny would never dream up a lyric like: “I don’t dance salsa, but I have tremenda salsita.”
Throughout the tracklist, Pitbull recalls his glory days by sampling ‘Mr. Saxobeat’ in ‘Melao’ (it’s notable that L0rna did it before and better), ‘Apache’ by Sugarhill Gang in ‘123 Back It Up’ (popularized by ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’), and the very ‘It’s My Life’ by Bon Jovi in ‘Now Or Never’.
Obviously, none of these tracks will approach the magnitude of the hits that used this same formula more than a decade ago. It’s hard to pin down who they’re meant for, but they clearly point to something bigger: we are living through a massive crisis.
Pitbull already pulled us out of sadness in 2009, a year after the world’s greatest economic crisis in nearly a century, thanks to his early global hits such as ‘I Know You Want Me’ and ‘Hotel Room Service’ (which recycled ‘Push The Feeling On’). Now, he has felt the urge to thaw out again. What if we needed Pitbull more than we thought?
