DJ Crazy Times’ full version of ‘Planet of the Bass’ is the closure we needed : NPR

DJ Crazy Times — aka Kyle Gordon — in his element.

Toby Tenenbaum

hide caption

DJ Crazy Times — aka Kyle Gordon — in his element.

The video is a winning combination of nostalgia, intrigue and surrealism. And its viral ascent can tell us a lot about modern meme culture.

Who is he? Well, it depends on who you mean.

What’s the big deal? For a brief moment, Gordon was able to seemingly unite the internet under one question: Eurodance was pretty weird, right?

Filmed in Zagreb, Croatia pic.twitter.com/BuY3YHk85D

— Kyle Gordon (@kylegordon101)

Want more from the world of arts and culture? Listen to the Consider This episode on the battle over book bans.

Full song make a release next week – Aug 15! pic.twitter.com/uY3u7Jkk99

— Kyle Gordon (@kylegordon101)

Kyle Gordon — Planet of the Bass (feat. DJ Crazy Times & Ms. Biljana Electronica)

What are people saying? NPR spoke to Gordon about his rapid ascent to virality, and how it felt different from other times.

When did you realize this stint at virality was different from the others?

I think it was that first weekend when I posted the first clip on Twitter. More or less, I posted on Twitter as a lark because I had a much larger following on TikTok and Instagram. But when this started, I had like 1,300 followers on Twitter.

So when I realized that it was like over that first day and over the weekend, like exploding on Twitter, I was like, oh my God, I’m in a different ballgame now.

Do people realize that you’re not DJ Crazy Times? (You’re not, right?)

If you’ve been following me, you know that I play tons of different characters. And this is actually a character that followers of mine on TikTok especially would have been familiar with, because it was one of my more popular characters.

December 2020, throughout that first year I was doing a lot of DJ Crazy Times, so [he] has sort of been percolating over the years. But yeah, the exact tenor of the new fandom, of some of the new fans I have, I don’t know, I’m still kind of figuring that out.

Can you speak on the drama with Ms. Biljana Electronica, the female performer featured in the videos?

So the first video I dropped [was] July 28th, but I had all three videos shot and edited before then. So it was always my plan to release all three.

And as I’ve mentioned before, it was sort of an homage to a trope of these, like especially early 90s Eurodance groups that would get a singer to sing the track and then if it became popular, they would just get an actress or a model to be in the music video.

And so it was an homage to that, but … this became so much bigger and it’s amazing that it found such a large fan base even outside of people who are fans of that music or even really knowledgeable about that music.

I think when I dropped the second video, they were like, “Well, Audrey did such an amazing job in the first music video,” and I think it was like a bit of whiplash.

But then when I posted the third video, people sort of started to realize the bit without me even really having to explain it that much. And then, if you saw the full music video I dropped today, Audrey’s back and she absolutely crushed it.

Are women still your favorite guy?

Even after all this, women are still my favorite guy. Yeah, I stand by that statement. You can quote me on that.

So what now?