Loops of Fury
David Kaye, thinking about the ripple effects of Go by The Chemical Brothers featuring in the Netflix movie Apex and how culture now "moves at the speed of clipping":
“Go” came out in 2015, peaked at number 46, and went back to sleep for a decade. Then Apex landed on Netflix on April 24, a survival thriller where Taron Egerton hunts Charlize Theron through the Australian bush. In one scene he puts “Go” on the radio, tells her she has until the song ends to run, and does a deranged little dance while he waits. The dance was improvised. It became a meme. Stressed parents started filming themselves telling their kids they had until the end of the song to get as far away as possible.The song jumped 429% on Spotify in a week. Number one on Shazam worldwide. Back in the UK top ten for the first time in over twenty years. And then, right on cue, the album.
None of which is new, exactly. Old song meets screen, screen goes viral, song comes back. Kate Bush did it in 2022 with Stranger Things. “Stuck in the Middle With You” did it after Reservoir Dogs. If that were all this was, I wouldn’t bother writing it down.
But Kate Bush needed you to watch the show. “Running Up That Hill” came back because Stranger Things was good and everybody watched it. The work was the delivery mechanism. You had to press play on the long thing to get the short thing.
“Go” didn’t need the movie. What actually spread was thirty seconds of a man dancing, clipped out, re-skinned a thousand ways, used by people who’ll never watch Apex and half of whom think it’s from the video game Apex Legends. You can see the difference in the numbers. Apex viewership went up in its second week on Netflix, 38 million to 40 million, which films basically never do. The meme fed the film and fed the song to everyone who skipped the film. Discovery came unbundled from the thing being discovered.
Old songs now come back through detached, decentralised fragments that make the source optional.
The clip feeds the meme. The meme feeds the song. The song feeds the film. The film feeds the clip.
Meme machines creating unplanned feedback loops in real time.
Discovery is now collateral damage.