What, exactly, makes a song the song of the summer? It can never be forced. It must simply float into the ether and, through a mystical combination of beat, lyrics, and immaculate vibes, rise to the occasion.
“Planet of the Bass,” 2023’s top contender, arrived in late July and instantly took over cyberspace. It involves a pink-haired DJ, his ebullient blond female companion, and the best synths this side of Sarajevo.
It also just happens to be a parody.
Brooklyn-based comedian Kyle Gordon dropped a short video on TikTok captioned “Every European Dance Song in the 1990s.” He’s in character as DJ Crazy Times, while his peppy vocalist, Ms. Biljana Electronica, sings her positive, if slightly off lyrics, along to a pulsing beat: “All of the dream/How does it mean/When the rhythm is glad/There is nothing to be sad.” It’s all building up to his rap: “Life, it never die/Women are my favorite guys/Sex, I’m wanting more/Tell the world, stop the war.”
Twitter content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Yes. Yes! Parody or not, “Planet of the Bass,” was a certified, undeniable hit. As of this writing, the earworm has over 89 million views on the website formally known as Twitter and five and a half million on TikTok.
The clip posted on TikTok is but a short taste of a full song that’ll be out on August 15th, a three-minute-long tune of glorious ’90s excess that features lines such as, “If the sky is not green/But The sky is a blue/Have a passion in a million way.” It’s a track on a longer comedy album that Gordon is releasing this fall featuring songs across genres, including 2000s country, pop punk emo, and children’s music.
So what’s DJ Crazy Times’s deal? “I think he’s never articulated his full backstory because his English is not amazing,” Gordon told GQ. “I would say he’s of ambiguous Eastern European origin, and I would say he’s a very hyper-sexualized, late ’90s Eurodance DJ and rapper.”
Gordon, 30, has been doing improv in New York City since 2014, but DJ Crazy Times originated back when he was in a college a capella group at Denison University in Ohio. It stems in part from his genuine fandom of groups such as Aqua, Real McCoy, and Toy-Box.
The original clip was filmed in the Oculus, the gleaming white and dystopian mall located on the site of the World Trade Center. His brother, Sam Gordon, filmed it on an iPhone before the crew was kicked out of the building. “Everyone was staring at us because we were literally in the middle of the Oculus,” Kyle recalls. “They let us go on for a while, but after a while a security guard just came up and was like, ‘Yeah, you can’t do this anymore.’”
The actress in the clip is Audrey Trullinger, though the vocalist on the track is the singer and songwriter Chrissi Poland. Gordon created the song with the producer Brooks Allison and soundmixer and engineer Jamie Siegel. When it came to his writing process, Gordon says, “I knew I needed the word cyber in there somewhere.” The standout lyric, “women are my favorite guy,” came to him because, “I think I wanted to say something about women.” (Gordon says his personal favorite is “there is nothing to be sad.”)
As for the clothes, Gordon wanted to go for a “90s space rave aesthetic,” and so he’s wearing a pair of his snow pants, clip-on hoop earrings, a vest that came along with an army costume, and his girlfriend’s swim goggles.
When asked to guess why “Planet of the Bass” has resonated so much, Gordon ventures that, “It’s this type of music was popular 20, 25 years ago, so it captures a lot of people like me who remember this music peeking through in the U.S. every now and then. You’d get a ‘Barbie Girl’ or a ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee, Da Ba Di).’ So I think maybe it’s just a nostalgia thing.”
He also pointed to the recent success of the Barbie movie. “I do have a hunch that the song ‘Barbie Girl’ might be back in the zeitgeist, and then you go out one more layer of reference from that, to ’90s Eurodance,” Gordon says.
When we spoke on Thursday, Gordon mentioned that “the ubiquity of positive reaction so far has been pretty mind-blowing.” A mere hour later, he posted another teaser video, this time featuring Mara Olney as the new female companion. It was filmed on Roosevelt Island, a New York City landmass that houses an abandoned smallpox hospital.
Twitter content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Many fans were disappointed by the switch in the original actress, though others pointed out that, “You might think its a bad decision to just release a worse version of your surprise hit but its actually the most europop response possible.” (There’s still one more teaser clip coming with another female TikTok star.)
Gordon is now contemplating potential followup songs. “Even within this broad genre of Eurodance, there are so many different sounds and ways you could go,” he says. “You could go more of a Vengaboys bouncy kind of way, or a ‘What Is Love,’ or more of a Tiësto, massive arena trance kind of thing.”
He was also thrilled to find that “Planet of the Bass” made its way all the way to the high priests of Eurodance: Aqua. “They commented on my TikTok and they wrote the best thing ever,” Gordon says. “They said: ‘Wait, is this play about us?’”