Songfacts®:

• There are times when we just need to take a deep breath and scream from the top of our lungs, "What's going on!?"
  
  That's how 4 Non Blondes frontwoman Linda Perry felt when she wrote this very cathartic song. "It's like, 'Why does it always seem like either I'm struggling, or there's some f--king political mess happening? Why is this all happening in the world?'" she said on the Backstory Song podcast.
• The phrase "what's up" doesn't appear in the lyric. The chorus refrain is "what's going on," but that's the name of a 1971 Marvin Gaye R&B classic.
• The song was influenced by the political climate of the time (George H. W. Bush was president), but there are no political references in the lyric, which makes it malleable and gives it staying power. "If you look at the lyrics, they don't mean anything," 4 Non Blondes bass player Christa Hillhouse told Songfacts. "It's the way the song makes certain people feel. In Europe where they're not speaking English, they know every broken-English word, and that song makes them feel something. I knew right when we played it, the song made the whole room feel this thing. It's a connection to humanity. Certain simple songs, that's what they do. There's an honesty there that breaks through that people can relate to. Then of course they played that song to death and a lot of people are really sick of it."
  
  "It also had to deal with, 'We're living, we're broke, all we do is play music,'" she added. "It was a weird time, the late '80s. We were living pretty raw, but when you're an artist and you're living that raw existence, you're so much more open and exposed with your feelings. We definitely weren't poseur types, we've always been pretty honest as individuals. The song was an expression of something she [Linda Perry] was feeling, and it ended up being a pretty universal experience. There's just something there that's pure, that you almost can't define, and that's the thing. We were just living as honest a life as we could, and I think the music that came out of it had heart."
• This was the first Top 40 hit by an openly lesbian group (somehow the Indigo Girls never got higher than #52).
  
  4 Non Blondes started in San Francisco in 1989 and gained traction at a time when record companies were looking for authentic female rockers who could translate to the pop realm. Christa Hillhouse told Songfacts the story: "We did really well in San Francisco, we got a lot of press and we were selling out all our shows. With the labels, once one of them looks at you, they all jump in line. A&R people are so brainless - if you're getting attention because people are coming to your shows, they'll check you out, but once one of them approaches you, they all approach you.
  
  We ended up signing with Interscope in June 1991. We had a shot with a couple of other labels, but we kind of freaked them out because we were kind of weird. At the time, we were all women, we were all gay - that was the time before it was the cool thing to do, I don't even think k.d. lang was out of the closet yet. I think the marketing thing threw a lot of labels off because they're always looking at marketing. Even by the end of the '80s, the record companies had really switched to where they were looking for that band that had that one hit. They wanted one hit, and then who knows after that - they didn't really develop acts anymore. When we got signed, they knew 'What's Up' sounded like a hit."
• Linda Perry was 24 when she wrote the song, not 25 as she states in the opening line:
  
  Twenty-five years and my life is still
  Trying to get up that great big hill of hope
  
  "25" sounded better, so she went with it.
• Perry ad-libbed the lyrics instead of writing them down. They flowed out of her in about 30 minutes. Hillhouse recalled: "For a short time, Linda had quit her job and she was living with me in this little two-bedroom flat in San Francisco. She wrote the song when she was in a room down the hall. I was in my bedroom having sex, and I stopped because I heard her playing that song. I remember running down the hall and saying, 'Dude, what are you playing? I like that.'
  
  We had a lot of rock, thrashy stuff back then, but Linda always would pull her ballads out. I remember being struck by it. She kept looking at me, going, 'Does this sound like something? Am I plagiarizing someone?' I said, 'Finish the song, it's beautiful.' It caught on at our shows right away, people really liked it."
• After the "And I scream at the top of my lungs, what's going on?" line in the chorus, Linda Perry sings, "Hey hey hey hey..." She put this part in as filler, planning to insert lyrics, but the song sounded so good that way she left it in.
• This was the second single from 4 Non Blondes' debut album, Bigger, Better, Faster, More. The first was a song called "Dear Mr. President." Their third single, "Spaceman," suffered from a lack of promotion and didn't do very well. They recorded songs for some movie soundtracks, but broke up soon after without ever recording another album. Says Hillhouse:
  
  "When we broke up we were in the studio working on songs. We were working with Dave Jerden, who did Alice In Chains. The pressure was unbelievable. We had all these songs that we didn't put on the first record that were socially relevant - one was about incest, about Linda's experience with incest. As far as I'm concerned, it's the most powerful thing she's ever written. We were putting songs on the second record like that. We figured we sold 5 million records, we could do what we want, right? Well, wrong.
  
  The label was up our butts and were really putting a lot of pressure on us. It's almost like your sophomore record, you have to outdo your first record. After you've sold 5 million for your debut album, it's a little difficult. I would never walk into a recording scenario thinking, 'How many records are we going to sell?' I could totally give a s--t, but I think the success part of being a songwriter is important to Linda. It doesn't make her good, bad or indifferent, we just had different goals at that point. I figured, 'We can do whatever we want now - we've got money, we've got power, let's make the record we want to make.'
  
  Linda was the one who was always schmoozed by the record company. I think she was encouraged to break up the band and do her own thing. As a band, we were uncontrollable to the label. Our first record we had creative control over, but we left certain songs off the record because they were really controversial and we figured the record company wouldn't push the record that way. By the second one, it's like, 'Hey, let's do what we want,' but when you have different goals as a band, you're going to fall apart. We're all fire signs, we kicked ass, took names and worked our asses off, but once your goals are split as a band, it's like being married and wanting different things - one person wants kids and the other wants to travel around the world - you're going to fall apart, and that's exactly what happened. It got so stressful, within a couple of weeks the whole mood changed and Linda just wanted out. I said, 'Dude, do what you've got to do.' Kurt Cobain had just blown his head off, and I was like, 'Music is supposed to be fun. If your art is not fun, then f--k it.' It more had to do with the pressure of the labels, the way they treat artists these days. Even if you've made them a bazillian dollars, which we had at that point - 5 million CDs, think about how much money that's generating for Universal - but it doesn't matter. They keep their noses planted firmly up your ass."
• "What's Up" wasn't a huge hit when it was released, peaking at #14 in the US, but in the streaming era it became one of the most popular songs from the '90s, crossing the billion mark on YouTube in 2021. It was just the fifth video from that decade to hit that mark, following "November Rain," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Zombie" and "I Will Always Love You." Interesting that all of these songs were from the first half of the decade.
• Some 4 Non Blondes trivia: Their first rehearsal was supposed to be on October 17, 1989, but they had to cancel practice because of the San Francisco earthquake.
• An industry mastermind helped save this song from overproduction. Said Hillhouse: "Recording that song was interesting. We recorded it with the rest of our album in Calabasas in Southern California with this producer [David Tickle], and Jimmy Iovine at Interscope heard the version we recorded with Interscope and then he heard the version we did on our demo take, and Jimmy Iovine liked the demo better. It was a cassette. He and Linda met, and then Linda came and said, 'We're going to re-record it.' I was like, 'Good,' because it got a little too foofed-up in major production land - it softened it up and took something out of it. We went to Sausalito and recorded it separately in one day, raw, because Jimmy Iovine knew the demo version was better than the one we did with the producer and all the fancy equipment."
  
  David Tickle got the production credit even though his version wasn't used, which didn't sit well with Perry. From that point forward, she was vigilant about claiming her producer credits.
• A dance remix by Dj Miko was released in 1993, reaching #58 in the US.
• The music video, directed by Morgan Lawley, got a lot of play on MTV, which was still playing videos at the time. Linda Perry, with dreadlocks, a nose ring, and the best top-hat this side of Slash, made a great focal point. Lawley went on to direct the videos for "I Kissed A Girl" by Jill Sobule and "Rebirth Of Slick" by Digable Planets.
• After 4 Non Blondes broke up, Linda Perry released a solo album in 1996 called In Flight, and another in 1999 called After Hours. Neither did very well, but she found her groove as a songwriter starting with Pink's 2001 hit "Get The Party Started" and followed by Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful."
  
  In 1999, she toured as an opening act for Bryan Adams, accompanied by her former bandmate Christa Hillhouse. "It was just us two, we had no crew, nothing," Hillhouse told Songfacts. "We followed their tour bus around in a van. Of course, Bryan Adams and his band were flying everywhere. We would finish the show, throw our s--t in the van and I would drive. It was insane. Their crew was always surprised when we would show up. The audience would look at us and forget who we were. I would tell them we were the Indigo Girls and we just got out of rehab. Eventually, Linda would start playing those three chords to 'What's Up' and they'd be like, 'Oh, I didn't know that was an Indigo Girls song.' It was fun, but then right after that, I didn't see her and I guess that's when Pink called her up. Pink's a huge Four Non-Blondes fan, a huge Linda Perry fan. She did that, then she did the Christina Aguilera thing."
• Pink put "What's Up" in her setlist for her 2002 Party Tour and has often played it live since. Growing up, she often sang it with her friends.
• In 2005, animators from Slackcircus Studios created a video called "Fabulous Secret Powers" with He-Man, the animated superhero of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, singing the tune. It became a popular internet meme and was often used as a bait-and-switch joke in the manner of Rickrolling (where people are tricked into clicking a relevant link only to be led to the video).
• This was used in three episodes of Sense 8: "What's Going On?" (2015), "Fear Never Fixed Anything" (2017), and "Isolated Above, Connected Below" (2017).
  
  It was also used in these TV shows:
  
  Ghosts ("The Work Retreat" - 2024)
  Yellowjackets ("Two Truths and a Lie" - 2023)
  Pam and Tommy ("The Master Beta" - 2022)
  Oogappels Episode 1:3 - 2019)
  Defiance ("Painted From Memory" - 2014)
  My Mad Fat Diary ("It's A Wonderful Rae: Part 2" - 2013)
  Being Erica ("What I Am Is What I Am" - 2009)
  Cold Case ("Late Returns" - 2004)
  
  And in these movies:
  
  Madame Web (2024)
  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2024)
  Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)
  The Justice of Bunny King (2021)
  The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)
  Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (2014)
  Wild (2014)
  Best Night Ever (2013)
  Young Adult (2011)
• "What's Up" is a very popular karaoke song and lends itself to participation. In a Songfacts interview with Linda Perry, she said: "I would try to play it different, and I'd have fun with it. A lot of times, I would have people come up on stage and sing it. We'd play to 30 thousand people, and I'd grab someone out of the audience and put them on stage and let them sing it. I've had people come up and play guitar. When a song gets that big, now it's interactive.
  
  I never felt comfortable singing it all by myself, so I started bringing people on stage to sing it with me. It got big because of their interaction, their embracing the song."
• Country singer Lainey Wilson has performed this song since her early days as a teenager singing in fairs and festivals across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. She eventually covered it for her 2022 Bell Bottom Country album.
  
  Though "What's Up (What's Going On)" is a cry of frustration, Wilson presents it as an anthem. "I've been covering this song for years. Like I played it when I was playing in the ArkLaMiss area, she told Taste Of Country. "It was a song that, it didn't matter what was going on, when this song came on and the chorus hit, everybody's arms went in the air and everybody's swaying back and forth."
• Dolly Parton covered "What's Up" for her 2023 rock album Rockstar. The accompanying video was directed by Steve Summers and was filmed at Eakin Elementary School in downtown Nashville. It finds Parton singing the song on a stage accompanied by Linda Perry on acoustic guitar as children sit at her feet.
• We know of at least one trivia team called "The 4 Non Non Blondes." Because they're blonde.
• A viral mashup of "What's Up?" and Nicki Minaj's "Beez In The Trap" became a phenomenon on TikTok in late 2025. The mashup was created by TikTok user and producer DJ Aux Lord, who combined Linda Perry's soaring chorus from "What's Up?" with Minaj's rap verse from "Beez in the Trap." The trend involves two people standing back-to-back: one lip-syncs to "What's Up?" and, as the camera swings around, the other takes on Minaj's rhymes.