About

Rockefeller Street is a song by singer Getter Jaani for Eurovision 2011 that later became popular online after a Nightcore remix of the song went viral thanks to a video in which two Chinese men dance to the track.

Origin

"Rockefeller Street" is a song written by Sven Lohmus performed by Estonian singer Getter Jaani. It was written to represent Estonia at the Eurovision Song contest 2011, coming in 24th place. A YouTube upload of the track was posted by Moonwalkstudio on January 9th, 2011, gaining over 2 million views as of November 2018 (shown below).





Spread

On July 21st, 2011, Osu! gamer Andrea originally posted the Nightcore remix of the track on his YouTube channel "andrea1992rw". Three days later, on July 24th, Andrea submitted the beatmap of the song to the online rhythm video game Osu!. On September 16th, TheNightcoreWitcher reuploaded the track on YouTube (shown below), which gained 7 millions views until November 2018 and reached 21 million in February 2019. The image used in both videos originates from Fuyunagi, an artbook published by the doujin circle "Ice to Choco" in 2010.





On March 8th, 2015, YouTuber "CatHoward" posted a video of two Chinese boys playing Osu! and dancing to the song while flinging their arms from side to side. On July 25th, "Chan Ylyl" uploaded the clip as well (shown below), but clarified in the description he was not the creator of the video and added that he found it on 4chan's /gif/ board. However, the video was originally posted on YouTube by "na k" back on January 1st, 2014. Despite being unavailable around 2018 and unlisted since, it has accumulated over 3 million views surpassing the other uploads.





The video helped the song gain popularity and inspire further parodies. For example, on November 26th, 2015, an anime club at a college performed a rendition of the dance, gaining over 468,000 views as of November 2018. (shown below, left). On July 16th, 2017, YouTuber Berd uploaded an animation for the song, gaining over 950,000 views (shown below, right).





TikTok revival

The song also became popular on TikTok. On September 11th, 2016, user @zee.456 posted a segment of the song for public use on the app (shown below, left), yet the song started trending in late 2018 due to thousands of duet chains of users imitating the dance of the original video while incorporating additional dance moves from other trends as well, such as Default Dance, The Floss, Shoot Dance and Orange Justice. One of the most well-known examples was made by user @djtaylortot, which gathered over 2 million likes and 33.1k comments until June 2019 (shown below, right).





On October 26th, 2018, YouTuber Shi posted a video of a chain of Tik Tok Duets set to the song (shown below, left). On November 6th, user BosMosVok posted a video calling "Rockefeller Street" one of the top five meme songs on the platform (shown below, right). As of June 2019, the trend has accumulated over 84 million views under the TikTok hashtag #rockefellerstreet, and over 2.3 million videos use the sample uploaded by @zee.456. Eventually, on January 2019, an official trend under the hashtag #showtimechallenge was announced on TikTok, and has accumulated 43.8M videos as of June 2019.





Getter Jaani's response

Due to all the attention the song received, Getter Jaani released an official high-quality ‘nightcore’ remix called "Rockefeller Street (New Nightcore Remix)" on December 14, 2018. On January 9, 2019, she held a small interview on Eesti Television (ETV), in which she talked about her song and its wide spread fame on the internet. Jaani also performed "Rockefeller Street" as a special guest at the Eesti Laul 2019 (shown below), a competition held in early 2019 to select the Estonian representant for Eurovision Song Contest of that same year.





Various Examples







Search Interest

Search for "rockefeller street" spiked on May 2011, month in which the semi-finals and finals for Eurovision Song Contest 2011 took place. Searches start increasing on October-November of 2018 and peaked on January of 2019. This goes along the start of the trend on Tik Tok and the announcement of the official #showtimechallenge on January 2019.

A small periodic spikes are observed each year throughout November and December. This is most likely related to the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree which is usually erected in mid November and lit in the following weeks.

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External References