![]() ![]() The teenage user “accent challenge” - a mushy, nearly unintelligible recital of slang with a hyperexaggerated Southwest Missouri accent - has reached tens of millions of viewers. But “the viral canon” is made up of much stranger sounds: evocative line readings from TV and film, a child beatboxing, an amateur golfer swearing. Homemade covers - someone singing in their bedroom a cappella or accompanied only by keyboard or acoustic guitar - can get traction, too. TikTok is well known as a music-industry hitmaker integral to the success of pop stars like Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion, as well as sleekly produced artists with writing teams capable of engineering the catchy, often danceable hooks that blaze through the app. Though TikTok didn’t invent the audio meme, its effortless interface may have perfected it, and the platform, which recently ended Google’s 15-year-long run as the most visited website in the world, would be nothing without sound.Īnd what a range of sound there is. Welcome to the era of the audio meme, a time when replicable units of sound are a cultural currency as strong as - if not stronger than - images and text. “Whenever I’m out with my friends, they’re like, ‘Oh, Chris is famous,’” Gleason said. (Often, they say they were convinced that the dialogue was from an actual reality-TV show.) Millions of people know how Chris Gleason sounds but have no idea what he looks like. Gleason’s voice, more than Gleason himself, is the star: The original post’s comment section is still frequented by people expressing shock that they’ve finally found the source after tracing it through its reuses. “But that one worked out to be 22 seconds.” (The accompanying score, named “Primal Fear,” was released by Dave James in 2011, and thanks to Gleason’s boost, leads a robustly meme-ed life of its own.) “I tend to be a little long-winded,” Gleason said while reflecting on his near-instant classic. Generic enough to apply to whatever scenario in which viewers might find themselves, it combined high-stakes drama and spot-on comic timing. Gleason’s dry delivery, coupled with the instrumental score he discovered while searching for dramatic reality-TV-show tracks, turned out to be ideal meme material. This year, the actress and model Shay Mitchell used the sound when she announced her second pregnancy, following in the steps of the singer Meghan Trainor, who used it in 2020 when she was in the third trimester of her first pregnancy. Footage of a lone tourist climbing to the top of Chichén Itzá in Mexico has been viewed 72 million times a restaurant’s demonstration of how you can cut a whole pizza to disguise eating a slice, 82 million. Through that repurposing, Gleason, who now works in advertising in New York, has gone viral again and again. Gleason’s sound has been used in at least 336,000 other videos. When a creator uploads a video to TikTok, they have an option to make that video’s audio a “sound” that other users can easily use in their own videos: lip-syncing to it, adding more noise on top or treating it as a soundtrack. They’re gonna know - is much, much larger. The post has been viewed more than 14 million times, but the reach of its exasperated exchange - Nobody’s gonna know. What he came up with - a mocking take on his conflicted inner dialogue - is now cultural history. Surely he, with his performance background, could be among them. TikTok had given so many users their 15 minutes of fame. A few of Gleason’s posts - him dancing to the “Law & Order” theme, a skit about clueless restaurant patrons - had gone modestly viral in the past, and he was intrigued by the possibility of making a megahit. ![]() That month, in the early days of the pandemic, American adults spent well over a billion hours on the platform, which had become the most downloaded nongame app in the world. In the interim, he recorded two or three videos a day, writing scripts and editing the footage on his phone. When Covid-19 temporarily shuttered indoor dining, he quit and moved back home before attending business school. Just before graduating from college with a musical-theater degree in 2019, he took a job at a nautical-themed restaurant in the Washington, D.C., area, where he served oysters and cocktails with names like Boston Tea Party and Blown Off Course. On March 25, 2020, Chris Gleason was in bed at his parents’ house in Pennsylvania, thinking up ideas for videos that might go viral. ![]()
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