Last Wednesday, the unfindable entertainer Cardi B placed a short clip letting her 60 million Instagram followers know how she felt about the affair on everyone’s minds: the Covid-19 epidemic. “Let me tell y’all something, I ain’t even gonna front,” she said in the profanity-laden 46 seconds. “A bitch is startled. I’m a little afraid.”
Clad in a clear transparent chain-link dress, she challenged the Trump administration’s reply to the pandemic, expounded on the delay in retail items being expressed from overseas and advised her followers to take the threat positively. In closing, she snickered a cartoon villain’s throaty laugh and moved to the knock of her own voice as she let out an dark but oddly musical cry: “Coronavirus! Coronavirus! I’m saying you, [expletive] is real! [Expletive] is gettin’ real!”
Several days later, a Brooklyn D.J. and maker who goes by DJ iMarkkeyz witness his fans chipping him in the video’s notes with a familiar request: “you know what to do.” To his 150,000 followers on Instagram, iMarkkeyz is common for “remixing” memes and viral videos. (He recently made a tune from Chaka Khan’s acrobatic depiction of The Star-Spangled Banner during last month’s N.B.A. All-Star game.) As he said in an email meeting, he makes between four and seven beats a day on Ableton, and he previously had a particularly hot one that fit the accent of Cardi adaging “coronavirus.”
“When people added me in that box, I was already slashing it all together in my head,” he said. And thus the uber-timely “Corona virus Remix” was born. Ostensibly overnight, it has gone well.
“Coronavirus Remix” has been firmly growing on download sketchs worldwide. It has hit No. 1 on iTunes in Bulgaria, Egypt and, most newly in Brazil.