Drake has been consistently making the kind of music that speaks to the masses, finding a path to constant success through utilizing social media trends in order to make his music go viral. His most recent song, “Toosie Slide,” is no different. With the rise of the TikTok dance challenge, “Toosie Slide” was created with intention of becoming the next most popular.
The app, TikTok is a platform where users can post short videos which have the ability to often go viral. As well, the app has been extremely popular with younger generations. With TikTok, users often recreate as well as build off of other’s content. A format which exemplifies this is the popular TikTok dance challenge, in which a specific dance is created for popular song and users across the platform recreate it in their own video. Currently, Megan Thee Stallion’s song, “Savage” has been incredibly popular, with celebrities like Jessica Alba taking part.
TikTok dance challenges have also allowed for less well known songs to suddenly go viral, such as Doja Cat’s “Say So,” which inspired it’s own dance challenge. Doja Cat herself recreated the dance in the music video, while also reaching out to the creator of the dance to be featured in the video.
Following these dance crazes, Drake put his own spin on the movement by intentionally set out to create a song that was perfect for this format. Drake reached out to the dancer, Toosie, via DM to ask him to create a dance for his, at the time, unfinished, song.
“Everybody was contributing little moves, and slowly but surely, we started piecing it together,” Toosie told GQ.
After recording their dance to the song, the clip was posted to TikTok and Instagram and went viral before the full version of the song was even released.
Toosie explained that it was Drake’s idea to post the dance clip before the song’s release, stating, “We’re the leaders of the dance community and he knows that. He wanted to get everyone up to speed before the song dropped. He was like, “Toosie, go ahead and post the video on your page. I want to see what it does.” Once we saw it was moving really, really fast, he was like, “Yo, my phone is going crazy right now. We have to drop it this week.” That’s how that happened.”
He continued, “Our original plan was holding on the dance, and we was going to shoot a big music video. Unfortunately, the crisis brought everything to a halt. We was hurt that the video couldn’t get done, but it also worked in our favor a little bit, because everyone is on the Internet right now and people are bored at home making TikToks and dance videos. So we were like, let’s drop it on some big quarantine vibes.”
The music video Drake did end up releasing features him on his own doing the Toosie Slide throughout his home.
Photo Source: Departures
