Canadian rapper Drake's new single Toosie Slide was released last Friday, but that is only if you think of a song's release in an old-fashioned way - which is to say, a full song and an accompanying official video put out by the artist himself.
Toosie Slide was truly let loose a few days earlier, when a well-known viral hip-hop dancer named Toosie posted a clip of himself and some of his dance celebrity friends - Ayo & Teo and Hiii Key - doing a smooth floor routine to a small section of the then-unnamed song, including the crucial dance instruction hook: "Right foot up, left foot slide/Left foot up, right foot slide."
The voice was Drake's, but the track was a mystery. Instantly the snippet, and more crucially the dance step, entered the slipstream of content on TikTok, where it began to spread.
Drake, who has been in a symbiotic relationship with the viral Internet for almost his entire career, had commissioned the dance clip, and by the time he made it official, Toosie Slide was already a hit.
In the song's proper video, Drake saunters around his Toronto mansion in a balaclava and gloves and is sure to hit the essential step.
But there is something uncanny happening: He is participating in a scheme of his own invention, but also is just another person emulating a popular dance step, as if he were not both the alpha and the omega.
Toosie Slide sets a low bar for participation - it is a dance song that even those who cannot really dance can dance to. It is marketing stratagem first, song second.
Maybe this is inevitable, though. Attention spans are shrinking and the most effective modes of distribution favour the brief and interactive.
TikTok videos end up like the equivalent of a movie trailer released before the film's completion.
The platform's power goes hand in hand with the rise of snippet culture, in which sections of songs played by rappers - Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert, among others - on social media become cult favourites and sometimes more popular than actual hits.
Increasingly, the way to cut through the clutter is to do less and leave behind a thirst - and an opportunity - for more. This has been happening organically on TikTok since the app's beginning: TikTokers mine music for snippets they can reinvent as short dances or comic films.
Look at recent popular dances, like the one-pose-per-mood routine to rapper Megan Thee Stallion's Savage ("I'm a savage/Classy, bougie, ratchet/Sassy, moody, nasty") or the soundtrack to the Renegade craze: Lottery, by rapper K Camp - or at least the beginning of Lottery, a song that K Camp eventually raps on.
In the case of rapper Jack Harlow's Whats Poppin, the clips do not feature a dance but thousands of young people shamelessly flirting with their phone cameras.
Toosie Slide merely anticipates the response - why not just cut to the chase?
Drake had already done this, unintentionally, with Nonstop, his 2018 song that recently became the soundtrack to one of TikTok's funniest routines - pop star Jennifer Lopez and her fiance Alex Rodriguez flipping the switch and swopping outfits.
And he is no stranger to feeding the viral maw. In 2015, the Hotline Bling video, with its lush neon-tone backgrounds and easily legible dance steps and facial expressions, was engineered for the meme era, every scene a potential GIF.
But less well-known artists who are savvy enough to read online tea leaves can do something similar. For them, TikTok can also serve as a test run, a way to gauge potential interest in an idea, a sound or a lyric, before committing resources to it.
Such is the case with The Kid Laroi, an Australian rapper who last month posted a snippet of a song on TikTok - "I need a bad b****/Addison Rae/Shawty the baddest" - name-checking the TikTok superstar with 31 million followers, who has been part of the dominant Hype House collective.
With everyone in quarantine glued to their phones, a strategic mention can reach its intended recipient.
On her Instagram story, Rae filmed herself listening to the clip, surprised, and posted a clip of herself playing it for her mother on TikTok.
Eventually, Laroi and Rae spoke.
"She was, like, 'Is this song, like, a real song?' and I was, like, 'Yeah, it is', and it wasn't, but I was, like, 'Yeah, it is'," he said in an interview with music website Genius.
And so, it became a real song - keyword optimised, algorithm-friendly, half-cooked but just cooked enough.
Most newborn rap songs from relative unknowns have just the faintest chance at survival in the harsh digital clime. But a nurturing boost from one of the most famous young women on the Internet might make it last.
NYTIMES
