“ Look, baby, I said I ain’t gon’ front,” he raps, tripping slightly over the words, “ you got my heart beating so fast to words I can’t pronounce.” It’s an endearing chink in the armour of his initial cockiness. Updating a smooth sample of Ginuwine’s “ Differences” found in a YouTube deep-dive, Smoke delivers a sensitive confession of catching feelings despite yourself. The viral hit “What You Know Bout Love” is not typical of the Brooklyn drill sound Smoke made his name with before he died, but it’s a genre-mixing crossover that deserved to make him a star. Pop Smoke’s posthumous album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon is heavy with the weight of potential. Nothing this year could be taken for certain, except for Megan Thee Stallion. Plus, it brought a part of our old world – where you could hear a song ad nauseum and then go to a sweaty club and rejoice when it came on – into the new one. Some of it was good timing, too: mouthing “classy, bougie, ratchet” while on the weekly outing to the big Sainsburys was a welcome bit of escapism. My oldest friend went micro-viral with a “Savage”-themed video that didn’t even feature the song! “Savage” is that magic ticket, a song that is timeless and yet speaks the language of its time – as, I believe, all the best pop music does. The self-appointed neighbourhood DJ played it every morning. I hummed it as I disinfected my door handles. Because the interview with the TikTokers was the last normal thing I’d done, I grew obsessed with their lives and soon found myself in a “Savage”-soundtracked hellhole. None of these events surprised me as much as the fact that a week later, five days into isolating in my 4x4m bedroom, I appeared to have memorised both the lyrics and the viral TikTok dance to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage”. In March of this year, a number of surprising things happened to me, loosely in this order: I interviewed a group of teens who have amassed stratospheric global fame on TikTok I went on a weekend away, then, approximately 24 hours into the trip, I became violently ill with what I didn’t yet realise was coronavirus. Plus, watching a llama dance freely in a desert to a club banger helps us imagine our future post-pandemic – and do not me, because 17.6 million people agree. With several unknown contributors, the short track illustrates the fractured ways we consumed music – anonymously, often context-free, via social media – in 2020, for better or worse. Expect a few record label marketing teams to be taking note. For all this unwieldy backstory, “Mi Pan Su Sus” is an undeniable earworm, proving more capable of permeating the brains of everybody, even those not on TikTok, than many traditional hits this year. The song was rebirthed when TikTok user chernaya.princessa (AKA Rozalia) had her two-month old acoustic version remixed and played for dancing characters in the online game, Roblox. A little digging (or, if you’re from Russia, a simple trip down memory lane) uncovered the source of the song’s mysterious lyrics: a 2010 Russian advert for the Kellogg’s cereal, Miel Pops. Known on TikTok as “ Mi Pan Su Sus”, the ten-second track went viral in July when it was used as the soundtrack to a soothing, red-lensed clip of a llama dancing in the desert. If you’re wondering why a remix of a decade-old Russian cereal advert has made our 2020 tracks of the year list – honestly, same.
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