How to Survive Your Song Going Viral on TikTok

You’re reading Infinite Scroll , Kyle Chayka’s weekly column on how technology shapes culture.

If you’ve heard the 2019 hit song “Tek It,” by the New York City-based band Cafuné, there’s a good chance it’s not the version that the group originally created. A clip on YouTube with more than six hundred thousand views features only the thirty-second chorus—a soaring refrain of “I watch the moon / Let it run my mood”—looped for ten minutes straight. Hundreds of commenters below say some variation of “I literally can’t stop listening to it.” Another version on YouTube speeds up the chorus, compressing even more loops into ten minutes; it, too, has hundreds of thousands of views. Other videos loop the track for longer, slow it down, or add reverb. These unofficial remixes, uploaded from unr