National Post (National Edition)
The Mannequin Challenge thrusts two musicians into limelight.
GETTING FROZEN IS SUDDENLY HOT
FYI: Black Beatles is neither a rebooted version of The Beatles, nor a new species of villainous insect. It is a song by formerly underground duo Rae Sremmurd, featuring Gucci Mane, which, thanks to a video meme called The Mannequin Challenge, has pushed the track to No. 1 in North America and the pair to the mainstream.
The twosome is made up of Atlanta brothers Khalif “Swae Lee” Brown and Aaquil “Slim Jxmmi” Brown. As Rae Sremmurd (a name created by spelling each word of the duo’s label, EarDrummers, backwards), their debut album was released to critical praise in 2015, but didn’t quite manage to go commercial.
Their second album, SremmLife 2, was released in 2016 to more positive reviews, but the band remained relatively under the radar, even when Black Beatles first hit the airwaves.
In comes The Mannequin Challenge, one of the more inane memes to hit society in recent years, but all the more mind-numbingly fun and unusually gripping.
It’s believed to have started with a class video in October by students from Edward H. White High School in Jacksonville, Florida. Although some have speculated that the intent of the video was to somehow promote awareness of testicular cancer, it turns out it was simply a prank devised by high schooler and Twitter user @thvtmelanin_, a.k.a. Emili.
“One day I just went to the front of the class and stood there,” she said to the website Inverse. “That’s when my friend A’laynah said, ‘Hey, you look like a mannequin.’ Then my friends Bre’Onna and Jasmine joined and we started doing all these crazy poses.”
With such charming origins, the video quickly went viral, originally without music. It was soon synced with Black Beatles, and lo, a meme was born.
With the hashtag #MannequinChallenge, the urge to spoof the video spread to high schools across America and soon enough, the world. Still-life tableaus have taken place during everything from bathroom breaks to fist fights to sports games.
First, it circulated through locker rooms around the country, from the Dallas Cowboys to the Pittsburgh Steelers to the New York Giants. The duo themselves did the challenge on stage at a Denver show earlier this month.
But once Adele, James Corden, Guy Fieri (whose Grocery Games show froze for a full four minutes), Blac Chyna and Rob Kardashian (who took it to the delivery room), Hillary Clinton (on a campaign plane, no less) and even Paul McCartney (an original Beatle himself ) took on the challenge, it became an Internet-certified phenomenon – all to the tune of Black Beatles.
It even had the power to reunite Destiny’s Child, if only for a few minutes, and Nicki Minaj dropped a remix of the song, titled Black Barbies, on Tuesday.
Bolstered by the meme, the song has since shot from No. 9 to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and by the end of the week will have sold over 120,000 downloads and been streamed over 35 million times, putting it ahead of The Chainsmokers and Halsey’s Closer, which had been No. 1 for 12 weeks straight — until now.
So while it may be worth asking whether Black Beatles made The Mannequin Challenge or The Mannequin Challenge made Black Beatles, just know this: Black Beatles exists, and we are a better, happier Internet for it.
MY FRIENDS JOINED AND WE STARTED DOING ALL THESE CRAZY POSES.