Random Dancing (Part 2)
For part one, click here. For the full piece on my website, click here.
“the Geek” would make new connections, and soon. Through connections, of course. He’d already taken the first step, only days before.
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With the glizzy variations, something sparked. Maybe it got enough views to warrant another try. Maybe it was something deeper, a symphony of synapses coming together at the right moment, crescendoing into a concept. Either way he tried again 10 days later, cycling through celebs named Dave, then again with characters from The Office, using TikTok’s looping video feature for effect. As he posited, “life is just a circle.” Both videos hit, netting hundreds of thousands of views. The comment sections started flooding with requests, imploring him to tie one disparate thing to another. Like any keen creator seeing their work gaining traction, Malik provided what the people wanted:
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Boom goes the dynamite. The algorithm was ready for it this time, as was his following to spread it into the digital winds. A hundred thousand plays. Then two, then five, then seven. A million. Two, three, four. Today it has close to five (4.7), with 1.3 million likes. In one post, Malik eclipsed the numbers of his past nine months of content combined. At last, and seemingly on the cusp of something, he tries to maintain the momentum. The next day, he threads the needle between a microwave and the rapper Blueface (1.6 million plays) and Gary the snail to Zendaya (4.7 million plays). The next, chocolate milk to Nike Air Force 1s (3.7 million plays) and a rock to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The latter busts through the ceiling, nabbing him seven million plays and nearly two million likes. There are over ten thousand comments, with larger, more popular ~verified~ creators singing his praises between more requests for more obscure connections. However he’d designed it, The Geek had tapped into a hidden well of consumer cool, and attention and engagement were gushing.
Even in the face of evident success, it’s tough to telegraph what makes anything resonate at large. What was it about these videos that elevated them to flourish? Their similarities to games like Wikipedia’s five clicks to Jesus or the Hollywood name game six degrees of Kevin Bacon, which connect to the greater sociological phenomenon of six degrees of separation? Is it the wily randomness of the suggestions? Is it how Lik navigates through them with his pop cultural knowledge, nonchalant charisma, ADHD and sheer wit? How he’ll often go longer than he needs to, forgoing the easy linkages to troll and luxuriate in the fun? Or is it the infectious Random Dancing, ever present bopping along in the background?
Perhaps a perfect storm of all the above, or none whatsoever. It’s different for every individual, and to try to describe why might ruin some of the enjoyment. Like the first time I heard Random Dancing—you just get it. Sometimes it just works. It got him to 100,000 followers. It wasn’t going to free him from Walmart or buy him the Jordans he wanted, but at least for that moment, in August of 2020, Malik had an identity, something that stuck on the fastest growing social platform (now at 66.9 million users) on the planet. He was the connector. The funny guy who does that thing.
In the aftermath of the TikTok upswell, Malik kept his game going. Why wouldn’t he? He had cornered a trend, and wanted to milk it for all it was worth. Even if the task seemed tedious or the suggestions ridiculous, he kept posting and made it look easy. But except for connecting one D’Amelio sister to the other [still his most played video to date (8.2 million)], none of his connector content reached the same reach. Eventually, engagement rolled back into the hundreds of thousands, or tens. Nothing to frown at, but not the stratosphere-catapulting numbers of a week or two before. Once again, so is the often-ephemeral nature of online success and attention. Gain all this traction, yet the algorithm and the masses still find a way to move on, jumping to some other shinier object somehow worthier of digital gaze.
I have no clue if this messed with Malik. He still seemed to keep going, working with the following he had. People now asked him to release freestyles, which he did on work breaks and on his walks home. On Soundcloud, he dropped one-offs like “Never Switch,” “the conjuring,” “Project X” and of course, kept blitzing out “Random Dancing,” by all the various means possible. In a way, the campaigning worked. When the song got uploaded to the lyric library Genius, his genuine pride was palpable. Bit by bit, he was still making it.
All the while, Malik explored different styles and niches, finding a new popular undercurrent through making unconventional top ten lists—songs, people who escaped the friend zone, smells. Attention waxed and waned (per usual), but with the overall wave of his enhanced viewership, became known for other defining jokes and storylines along the way. He became the originator and poster child for the attack on coleslaw; explaining its evil, writing diss tracks about it, hyperslandering it, reacting to videos of it, redacting it from food orders, incentivizing it as song promo, and on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, even attempted to bring his divided country together through it (though you might want to lower your volume):
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Overkill? Absolutely. But you’ve got to. This is online jokery—intentional or not, if you start a trend, a gag, become somebody, you must navigate those who are attracted to it—any and all have the chance to jump in on the festivities, toss in their variation, addition, response, embellishment, two cents, injecting an extra shot of fuel to keep the yuk-yuk engine running. Malik’s comedically tinged coleslaw convictions were so strong that his followers built their own following around trolling him, stuffing his TikTok mentions and DMs, even crossing over onto his Instagram. In his acceptance of this sub-community, he'd become an open door to respond to the depths of his supporters’ weird and wild sides, even making content out of the content he was being sent:
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Beneath all his hems and haws, I imagine Malik kind of loved it. After all, this was audience interaction at its finest. The mark of someone who’s made one.
In March 2021, Likdageek made his official rap debut with four song EP. The cover art is his own, a colorful abstract overlaid on a simple white background listing the title, “Freaks and Geeks.” The nine minutes of music, as confidently executed as Random Dancing and his previous releases, is smoother, better mixed, cohesive. You really hear his voice. His choruses better crafted, beat selection curated. His lyrics slip, slide, swing and surprise, packing in all his favorite topics—coleslaw, cartoons, sports, Zendaya. In his words and the ways he says them, you can tune into his influences up and down the tracklist—the melodic variance of Chief Keef, BabyTron’s snappy couplet verses, the introspective rawness of JuiceWrld and Lil Uzi, Ski Mask the Slump God’s barreling flow, unorthodox topics and instrumentals. In his seriously unserious approach, Malik carries on a tradition paved by Lil B, Lil Dicky, Lil Ugly Mane, early Tyler the Creator and Zack Fox; artists with considerable talent who approach rap differently than the earnest hard-hitting guns, gangs, money, drugs and female-conquesting thematics that dominate trap, drill, and even mainstream pop-rap today. Likdageek and his contemporaries cover some of the same lyrical ground but approach it with a different stylistic framework and intent. Like medieval court jesters, they drop facades and decorum, understanding, articulating, and bringing you closer to reality—that the world difficult, awesome, icky, funky, funny, off-kilter, even absurd. We can’t go on, but we must go on. Or, as Lik puts it:
“I don’t know what the fuck to do...but I gotta make it through.”