With “History in the Making,” Vo Williams provides Bucks’ soundtrack.
‘History in the Making’ has become team mantra
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Hey, it worked for the Tampa Bay Lightning, so why not the Milwaukee Bucks?
To get fans and the players amped up for home games this season, the NHL team used an anthemic hip-hop track, “Ready, Set” by Vo Williams, as the season's theme song and their introduction video. The Lightning went on to clinch the Stanley Cup on July 7.
Now the Bucks are in the NBA Finals, striving for their first championship trophy in 50 years. The hype song they've been using this season: a Vo Williams track, “History in the Making.”
“A lot of people are calling me good luck,” Williams told the Journal Sentinel Tuesday, the morning after partying with the Tampa Bay Lightning at their boat parade. “I don't know yet, but if I can confirm that I will be charging a lot of money.”
“History in the Making” has become more than a hype song for a basketball team.
It's become a mantra.
One behind-the-scenes video caught Jeff Teague rapping the verses to get himself pumped before the Bucks crushed the Atlanta Hawks in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals. The words “History in the Making” have circulated on social media from Bucks fans, been printed on rally towels during the playoffs, and tower over the Deer District on a massive poster plastered on Fiserv Forum featuring the Bucks' starting lineup.
And the Bucks are indeed making history, from playing their first finals games in five decades to Giannis Antetokounmpo's out-of-this-world performances.
“The lyrics just fit so well in a lot of ways with what we were doing,” said Dustin Godsey, chief marketing officer for the Bucks. “It's really rewarding for us as an organization to see how this team has embodied it. … You can't help but feel like this is a pretty special moment.”
Perfecting ‘Epic Hip Hop’
The Bucks have worked through multiple generations to get to this point. Williams, a Sarasota, Fla., native making music in Los Angeles for 12 years, has also devoted his life to perfecting a sound he's dubbed “Epic Hip Hop,” inspired in part by stadium-stunning rock legends like Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Guns N' Roses and Queen.
“I love and appreciate and respect Top 40 hip-hop, but that music tends to be about satisfying your cool and your swagger,” Williams said. “It's all about remaining idle in the tense moments and remaining idle in the happy moments. It's always in the middle, and I love that Fonzie feeling, but if you need to explode into joy and explode into that fight, that doesn't satisfy that moment. … I make music as a tool to motivate people, to break through challenges and elevate them to the next level.”
Williams' anthems have taken him to the next level. He's amassed a whopping 1,500 syncs throughout his career, in promos for Disney+, XBox, WWE, “Creed II,” HBO's “Ballers” and “Insecure,” Fox's “Empire,” and the forthcoming G.I. Joe movie “Snake Eyes.”
But “History in the Making” is particularly personal to Williams, written in part as his answer to “the modern civil rights movement,” the lyrics inspired by the Black Lives Matter marches that erupted around the world last summer.
“We got to plant a seed for the future,” Williams raps during the bridge, “even if we never live to see the shade.”
The music video, released last June, includes stirring footage from marches, along with figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, whom Williams credits as inspiration for the song.
“What happened to George Floyd motivated me to finish the lyrics,” Williams said. “It really is about Black achievement ... and how we can look up to our heroes to accomplish things that we never accomplished before.”
‘It just resonated with us’
The Bucks' Godsey said it was one of four or five finalists for the season's theme song, becoming the official anthem specifically because it stood for something greater than basketball itself.
“It spoke not only to what we wanted to achieve in the sport, but spoke to the larger moment as a whole … in terms of the pandemic and coming out of the bubble, and coming off the heels of Jacob Blake and the team kind of shutting down the sports world,” Godsey said. “It just resonated with us.”
And it's resonated with a growing number of Bucks fans as favorable COVID-19 conditions allowed the team to gradually open seats, leading up to full capacity for the playoff games and up to 25,000 people cheering outside in the Deer District.
On Sunday, Williams got to experience that excitement for himself when he performed the song live at Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Fiserv Forum. It was the first time a vocalist has performed an intro song at a Bucks home game, Godsey said. Williams will also perform the song live right before tip-off for Game 4 Wednesday at Fiserv Forum.
“It made all the difference in terms of setting the tone and the energy in the building,” Godsey said. A couple of hours after Williams' performance, the Bucks beat the Phoenix Suns in a blowout, 120-100.
“To walk in that arena and hearing that music in that stadium that people know and they're singing along with me and screaming at the top of their lungs … it felt like I was coming home to a place I have never been to,” Williams said of performing the song at Fiserv Forum. “It feels like destiny.”
“Whispering those words (history in the making) in my head, I never imagined it would impact a team in that way and would be on rally towels and on the side of an arena,” he continued. “It's really wild to see how an idea so small and simple can grow into a colossal and epic form of expression. … I'm happy my music is living its purpose and is being used in the right way to inspire people.”