<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve heard the 2019 hit song \u201cTek It,\u201d by the New York City-based band Cafun\u00e9, there\u2019s a good chance it\u2019s not the version that the group originally created. A clip on YouTube<\/a> with more than six hundred thousand views features only the thirty-second chorus\u2014a soaring refrain of \u201cI watch the moon \/ Let it run my mood\u201d\u2014looped for ten minutes straight. Hundreds of commenters below say some variation of \u201cI literally can\u2019t stop listening to it.\u201d Another version on YouTube speeds up the chorus, compressing even more loops into ten minutes; it, too, has hundreds of thousands of views. Other videos loop the track for longer, slow it down, or add reverb. These unofficial remixes, uploaded from unremarkable accounts, create a kind of Satie-esque audio overdose, pounding the band\u2019s melody into abstraction, pure stimulus. They also demonstrate the malleability of culture in the era of user-generated content. With A.I.-augmented editing software instantly accessible online, no piece of art can rest safely as a finished product; almost anyone can offer up their own polished version of a song, a video, a text, an image to an online crowd. The audience dictates not only how a song is interpreted but, increasingly, what it sounds like and which versions get released\u2014which can be frustrating for the artists behind it. \u201cThis is not a McDonald\u2019s,\u201d Noah Yoo, who forms one half of Cafun\u00e9, told me during a recent video call.<\/p>\n Yoo and his bandmate, Sedona Schat, met as students at New York University\u2019s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and formed Cafun\u00e9 in 2014, for a school assignment. (They were in the same class in which Maggie Rogers<\/a> played her song \u201cAlaska\u201d for Pharrell Williams, producing a viral video clip that kick-started her career.) Yoo wears round wire-frame glasses and sweeps his dark hair back; Schat describes herself as a tomboy and keeps her hair in a pixie cut. Together, their aesthetic is nineties retro, with the look of detective protagonists from an after-school cartoon. They chose the name Cafun\u00e9 from a list of evocatively untranslateable phrases; in Brazilian Portuguese, it describes the gesture of affectionately playing with a loved one\u2019s hair. After graduating, Yoo wrote for Pitchfork<\/em>, covering music news, and Schat worked in the restaurant industry. Cafun\u00e9 finally produced a d\u00e9but album, \u201cRunning,\u201d in 2021, when the pair found the time to record and release it themselves during the pandemic. For a year, it received largely local attention within the New York indie-music scene. Then, in 2022, they noticed that \u201cTek It,\u201d the album\u2019s second track, was getting a surge of inquiries on Shazam, the music-identification app. \u201cThere\u2019s something strange happening,\u201d Yoo recalled thinking. The attention was coming from TikTok, an app that the band didn\u2019t even use. But someone had posted a sped-up version of \u201cTek It\u201d to soundtrack an anime fan edit, and thousands, and then millions, of other users were picking up the sound to include in their own videos. (Sped-up remixes are part of an established internet genre called \u201cnightcore.\u201d) The song hadn\u2019t been intentionally engineered for TikTok fame, but something about its Auto-Tuned combination of nostalgia and angst over a past relationship gave audiences a feeling that they desperately wanted to channel. \u201cWhat you do has very little to do with if you\u2019re chosen by the algorithmic gods,\u201d Schat said. \u201cIt\u2019s a literal slot machine.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTek It\u201d became one of the emblematic songs of TikTok\u2019s rise in the United States. Riding its momentum, Cafun\u00e9 signed to the major record label Elektra. \u201cEveryone who goes viral is immediately pressed with the same task, which is to keep the ball in the air,\u201d Yoo said. The band hustled to build their social-media accounts, play shows, and produce a new EP. They also put out an official sped-up version of \u201cTek It,\u201d replicating the most popular online iteration. \u201cTek It\u201d and its variations now have more than a billion streams on Spotify, a success by any measure. But the band\u2019s boom was short-lived. In 2024, Cafun\u00e9 was dropped from Elektra amid a wave of music-industry restructuring. \u201cThat amount of profit wasn\u2019t enough to convince anyone of anything,\u201d Yoo said. Cut loose, the duo decided to use their earnings to spend a whole year acting like a more traditional band: writing songs full time, guided by nothing other than their creative whims. They put together an album to release on their own independent label, Aurelians Club, and signed a distribution deal with SoundOn, TikTok\u2019s in-house musician platform. Schat told me mordantly, \u201cIt\u2019s funny that the TikTok corporation gave us more favorable terms than any label was capable of giving.\u201d Every musician today is forced to become a content creator, \u201cwhether they want to be or not,\u201d Yoo added. \u201cIt feels like we\u2019ve all become, like, employees for platforms.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBite Reality,\u201d Cafun\u00e9\u2019s new album, will come out on September 12th. It continues in the hard-charging, electro-acoustic vein of \u201cRunning,\u201d inspired in equal parts by emo, shoegaze, and nineties Japanese rock, but deepens the band\u2019s sound with more expansive instrumentation and subtler lyrics\u2014evidence of post-viral maturity, perhaps. (From the sweet, autobiographical song \u201cIn My Pocket\u201d: \u201cI feel free to make my mistakes in front of you.\u201d) Cafun\u00e9\u2019s hooks are adept, but without an internet sensation to grab listeners\u2019 attention their music risks getting lost in the thicket of individual musicians who cultivate stronger personae: Mk.gee<\/a>, MJ Lenderman, Clairo. Bands, which submerge personalities in a collective identity, seem to have faltered lately as a unit of musical celebrity. One thing that distinguishes the latest album is a persistent theme of internet-induced ennui. Its lead single is \u201ce-Asphyxiation,\u201d a cathartic outcry against the self-commodification demanded by social media.\u201cYou gotta keep engagement high \/ I might as well not even try \/ who are all these people,\u201d Schat sings over pounding drums and Yoo\u2019s distortion-roughened guitar. She told me, \u201cAll of these things that one is supposed to do on the internet, like show the parties you\u2019re going to or have this skill set of how to present your face and body to the camera\u2014it just doesn\u2019t feel like me.\u201d The pair pasted a note in their studio with the words \u201chigh tech, low life\u201d echoing the sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling\u2019s description of the author William Gibson, a pioneer of the cyberpunk genre, of which Cafun\u00e9\u2019s vibe partakes. To them, the phrase conveyed the precious shreds of humanity that survive the dehumanizing effects of the internet. Despite all of our apps, \u201cBite Reality\u201d avers, we still feel the same feelings: loneliness, thwarted ambition, unrequited love, wondering how to grow up or how to recapture youth.<\/p>\n Can independent musicians today survive without, as Schat puts it, giving their \u201clife force to the internet?\u201d Cafun\u00e9\u2019s trajectory suggests a shift in the relationship between artist and consumer. \u201cHow much power does the audience really have?\u201d Yoo said. \u201cTurns out, they have tons of power.\u201d Other musicians are explicitly shaping their outputs to meet the demands of social media. In 2024, the pop star Sabrina Carpenter released an EP featuring six versions of her hit \u201cEspresso,\u201d including a \u201cDouble Shot Version\u201d that speeds up the track much like Cafun\u00e9 did with \u201cTek It,\u201d following the nightcore remixes of \u201cEspresso\u201d that were already floating around YouTube. In the run-up to \u201cBite Reality,\u201d Cafun\u00e9 has been posting on TikTok consistently, sharing clips from studio sessions, wacky dances, and lip-synchs. However much the band may want the focus to be on the music and their live performances, social media still offers the surest way to reach fans who likely discovered them on TikTok to begin with. Yoo remembered something he had said years ago, before Cafun\u00e9\u2019s viral success, in a Pitchfork<\/em> editorial meeting, which he recalls being met with scoffs at the time: \u201cMemes are going to be more culturally significant to this next generation of music listeners than music.\u201d Being a meme can be hard, but not being one may be even harder. \u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019ve heard the 2019 hit song \u201cTek It,\u201d by the New York City-based band Cafun\u00e9, there\u2019s a good chance it\u2019s not the version that the group originally created. A clip on YouTube with more than six hundred thousand views features only the thirty-second chorus\u2014a soaring refrain of \u201cI watch the moon \/ Let it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1983725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[356524,21800,22149,21928,22488,317847],"class_list":["post-1983724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-hit-songs","tag-music","tag-musicians","tag-social-media","tag-tiktok","tag-viral-videos"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/How-to-Survive-Your-Song-Going-Viral-on-TikTok.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1983724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1983724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1983724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1983725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1983724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1983724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1983724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}