Viral ‘Hostile Government Takeover' TikTok Gets Turned Into Best-Selling Dance Banger
Welcome to Billboard Pro's newsletter, where we take a closer look at the songs, artists, curiosities and trends that have caught the music industry's attention. Some have come out of nowhere, others have taken months to catch on, and all of them could become ubiquitous in the blink of a TikTok clip.
This week: A viral TikTok is remixed into a best-selling protest song, an indie rock institution is introduced to younger fans (again) through a big movie synch and Philadelphia gets to celebrate yet another February win via a breakout rap hit.
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A few weeks after Donald Trump returned to the White House and started dismantling norms left and right, the TikTok user AGiftFromTodd recorded a 30-second video of himself getting ready to leave his house while crooning an original song that began with the line, 'We're in the middle of a hostile government takeover/ I wanna talk about it, but I'll be late for work.' Todd's soulful alarmism went viral, with thousands of likes and shares on TikTok upon its Feb. 4 upload, and while he posted a few new versions of the song in the following weeks, the one that's crossed off to streaming services in a major way is an EDM remix that pairs hopelessness with a club thump, courtesy of producer Vinny Marchi.
'Hostile Government Takeover' by AGiftFromTodd & Vinny Marchi spent a good chunk of last weekend at No. 1 on iTunes, selling 4,800 downloads from Feb. 21-24, according to initial data provided by Luminate. Meanwhile, its streams keep climbing — the dance remix earned 597,000 official U.S. on-demand streams over that four-day span, up from 153,000 streams from the previous Friday-to-Monday tracking period. As the song debuts at No. 13 on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs this week — plus No. 2 on Dance/Electronic Digital Song Sales and No. 12 on Digital Song Sales — and continues to spread, the good news for Todd Givens Jr. is that the next four years will offer plenty of new material to riff on for follow-ups. – JASON LIPSHUTZ
If there's one rock act from 20 years ago that doesn't especially need any more bumps from newfound Gen Z virality, it's probably New York's the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The trio, which reunited in 2022 for its first album together in nearly a decade, spent a stunning eight weeks atop the Billboard TikTok Top 50 chart last year for signature 2003 power ballad 'Maps,' racking up millions of streams a week for the revitalized (and re-viralized) hit. Now, the group is surging again with a catalog hit – though this time, it's not with another decades-old song, but rather a song from that reunion album.
'Spitting Off the Edge of the World,' which was the lead single of 2022's Cool It Down and featured an assist from acclaimed alt-pop singer-songwriter Perfume Genius, has gotten a big look in Apple TV's original movie The Gorge, released on Valentine's Day. The song plays during a pivotal love scene between the film's co-leads – played by film stars Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy – and it shot to near the top of the Shazam charts almost immediately after the film's release, still sticking around there a week later, as folks scrambled to find out what the doomy song playing in the action romance was.
A whole lot of those Shazamers undoubtedly ended up streaming 'Spitting' as well – as the song racked up 629,000 official on-demand U.S. streams for the tracking week ending Feb. 20, a 375% gain for the song from the previous week, according to Luminate. And many ended up purchasing the song, too: 'Spitting' sold nearly 3,000 copies in that week, a massive gain from the just-over-100 it moved the week before, and good enough for a No. 15 debut on the Digital Song Sales chart – the group's first-ever appearance on that listing. – ANDREW UNTERBERGER
Last fall (Sept. 9, 2024), a nameless TikTok account uploaded a snippet of a then-unreleased Skrilla song titled 'Doot Doot.' The snippet quickly rent viral due to his rambling opening verse, 1ellis' gritty production and his memorable delivery of the phrase 'six, seven.' Since September, the snippet has been used in over 126,000 TikTok posts, eventually giving way to an official DSP release on Feb. 7, 2024.
As the 'Doot Doot' snippet continued to make the rounds on TikTok going into 2025, the song earned an unforeseen supporter in Taylor 'TK' Kinney, a basketball star for RWE of the Overtime Elite league. Hailing from Newport, Kentucky, the baller has found a way to say 'six, seven' in Skrilla's cadence in nearly every interview from the past few months. The phrase is now synonymous with both TK and Skrilla on socials, and the two young men got to link up in person at an RWE game two weeks ago.
For weeks, TikTok users have been responding positively to TK's 'clip farming' — a practice that basically entails purposely doing something in hopes that it will be clipped and reuploaded across social media – by making edits of his game highlights that are soundtracked by his 'six, seven' quip merged with the 'Doot Doot' snippet.
According to Luminate, 'Doot Doot' earned 1.7 million official on-demand U.S. streams during its first week of released (Feb. 7-13). That figure shot up 105% the following week to over 3.5 million streams. The track has already racked up 3.2 million streams over the first four days of this tracking week (Feb. 21-24), according to initial data provided by Luminate, which marks an 88% jump from the same period the prior week.
With its official music video garnering over 1.26 million YouTube views in just over a week and no signs of slowing down on TikTok, there's tons of room for Skrilla's latest hit to continue growing. – KYLE DENIS
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