Rapper’s TikTok smash hits Spotify milestone
‘Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)’ reaches one billion plays on streaming service
When Canadian rapper Powfu’s inescapable song “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)” graduated from TikTok sensation to passing a billion plays on Spotify this week, he celebrated in the most characteristic of ways.
“I thanked God, posted on Instagram and shot some hoops,” he said by email.
Notoriously low-key, the devout 22-year-old born Isaiah Faber finds pandemic fame suits him well, partly because it’s given him space to process the sensation of “Death Bed” from the comfort of his family home in Abbotsford, B.C.
The sleepy tune, which uses a sample of British singer Beabadoo-bee as the hook, was uploaded to his SoundCloud page in early 2019, and it took the better part of a year for TikTok users to make it the soundtrack to millions of videos.
From there, its popularity offline surged, rising to No. 23 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart last year.
But hitting one billion plays on Spotify, the world’s leading streaming music service, puts him among an exclusive group of Canadians including Drake, Shawn Mendes, Justin Bieber and The Weeknd, who each have multiple songs sitting above that threshold.
Across all streaming platforms, “Death Bed” has racked up nearly 2.7 billion streams, according to his U.S. label, Columbia Records.
Faber, who still films many of his music videos on his iPhone with his cousin’s help, recently spoke with The Canadian Press by phone about using TikTok, staying grounded and why he’s ready to tour.
The story of how “Death Bed” went from a song on your SoundCloud page to a sensation on TikTok a year later is pretty wild. How did you learn so many people were embracing the track a year after it came out?
I started (to see a spike in viewers) on YouTube and I didn’t really know why the views were coming in. So I started looking on other apps and TikTok had thousands of videos made with it. I was hyped, mind blown, because … it was just random videos of people using it as background music.
It must have been surreal to be stuck indoors watching your music take on a life of its own. Did you imagine what it would’ve been like to play these songs live?
I’ll watch videos of (late Sound-Cloud rappers) Lil Peep and XXXTentacion performing and it looks so hype.
Every time I make a song I kind of envision I’m performing it. I always work on music just in my bedroom by myself. It’s such a different atmosphere to be performing it in front of everybody. But I feel like it’ll be such a cool feeling.
People usually listen to my music when they’re alone, so the fact that all these loners will be listening at the same time, it’ll be really pretty cool.
You’ve embraced TikTok by uploading a steady flow of videos almost daily. How do you view the platform in the bigger picture of your career?
Obviously, my label and manager want me to make as many TikToks as I can, because it does help and there’s a chance they’ll blow up. But it’s pretty hard, like, I don’t really know how to come up with ideas because I’m not really a performer or actor.