We take a ride on the Tube with Will R…
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Harlan Talib Ockey: google — “who is tube girl” “why are the trains windy in london” “first lady of juicy couture song tiktok” “ayesha erotica yummy tiktok tube girl remix??????” “PLEASE I NEED TO FIND THIS SONG–“
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Will Rivitz: If you’re part of the appropriate subgenre of Extremely Online, you may dimly recall this mashup soundtracking the Tube Girl TikTok trend over the course of a few weeks in September. A refresher for the reasonable majority of us, myself absolutely excluded, who have better uses for their long-term memory: The trend, which asks the TikToker to lipsync on the subway, takes its specific shape from the way it’s shot, all 0.5-zoom selfie and camera whipped in dizzying directions every other beat. On its face, the trend is unremarkable — most of its chatter revolved around the delulu audacity required to gesticulate violently in public, chatter broadly shared with basically every other trend on the app — but one particular detail sticks out to me every time I return to it or its regular soundtrack. Others who hopped on the trend filmed their videos in a variety of contexts, filming in broad daylight, at peak rush hour, whatever and whenever; the only requirement, really, is enough elbow room to whirl about without whacking anyone else. However, the consistent setting of the videos filmed by Sabrina Bahsoon, the trend’s originator and popularizer, lies in stark contrast with the energy drink confidence of her dance moves. Bahsoon regularly films her TikToks while the train heads through a dark tunnel, dingy floors and walls made uglier by harsh fluorescent lighting. The few commuters who dot the background of her videos typically pay her no mind, scenery rather than active participants. In her videos, Bahsoon portrays a desolate scene behind herself, almost entirely empty and devoid of spirit, a true-to-life depiction of day-to-day drudgery that lends her videos much more power than a lively backdrop would. This is critical to the spirit of Tube Girl. Joyful dance is tinged with melancholy, confidence is juxtaposed with apathy. One girl can rage against the pallid normalcy of the tube, but the pallid normalcy of the tube cannot be shaken; no matter the abandon with which you dance, you cannot part life’s dreary curtain even a smidge. So, too, with the trend’s most prominent soundtrack. Ayesha Erotica provides the easiest foothold, blasting through each verse and chorus with the incisive and crushing power of a drill rig. The song is basically complete from her voice alone, as made obvious by the two-note simplicity of the production originally accompanying her on “Yummy.” Mashed up with “Righteous,” though, the bitterness and misery of Ayesha’s verses begin to seep through more noticeably. Her lyrics are confident but largely unhappy; any self-aggrandizement is laden with an acerbic edge for those slighting her, and there are enough tossed-off self-deprecating jokes (“Yeah, he love me, but he fuck me like he hates my guts” and “I’m a fake bitch, so I’m paying him dust,” for two) that they begin to sound a little too real. It’s easy to call this song a portrait of an artist who, despite all she crows to the contrary, simply cannot stand herself, particularly if we use what we know of Ayesha in real life: She abruptly removed herself and all her music from public view about half a decade ago for reasons that remain unclear to this day, and has not really resurfaced since, leaving her stans to diligently keep her image alive despite someone ostensibly taking action to remove her music every time it gets illegally re-uploaded. However, we don’t really need that extracurricular information; recontextualizing her lyrics outside of her typical Y2K scene production and into this mashup’s beat gives us all the reading material we need. The verses match the production so well that it’s difficult not to see the beat’s official use as a farcical tragedy; Ayesha Erotica and Mo Beats are meant for each other here. “Righteous” sets a vibe equal parts Blade Runner neon and postapocalyptic SNES RPG; the instrumental is beseeching, morose, crystal tears falling into the wind from a skyscraper’s height. It sounds plaintive and lonely, its wind-whipped arpeggios cascading brilliantly over a backdrop flattened into desolate wasteland by their force. It is, in other words, a perfect companion for its lyrics, delicately cradling and nurturing Ayesha’s jagged edges until it’s hard to believe she was ever bragging. Juxtaposed as they are, vocal and instrumental bellow against the dreariness of a world unable to fulfill or shelter their unbounded selves. They’re raging against the night until dawn breaks and the world returns; they’re burning some mark on an existence that reacts so little to any heat that it’s difficult to believe the mark will ever appear. In other words, they’re gyrating wildly, face cocked into a self-assured snarl, against a mundane backdrop that could not care less, and they gyrate and snarl even still. Tube Girl and its associated sound may have lasted a week or two, but both the hopelessness and the fiery conviction that we can rage against that hopelessness until we draw our last breath have seared themselves into my mind ever since.
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Rachel Saywitz: Not totally understanding this remix, which completely sucks out the cute-core joy of “Yummy” so that… I don’t know, I guess so that designer brands and toilet paper crafters can use on it TikTok? I guess when so much of our media literacy is intentionally muddied by billion-dollar corporates, it makes sense that we sometimes lean towards watered-down art, with all its weirdness filtered out so it becomes functionally useless. Or maybe I just don’t like mashups in general. It’s one or the other!
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Katherine St Asaph: For reasons best left unplumbed by me and others, I killed an hour or so the other day watching old American Idol clip reels. I expected to be struck by the casual cruelty in which mid-2000s pop culture marinated those who lived it. What I didn’t expect (and in retrospect, I’m not sure why) were the YouTube comments embracing it, laughing at the freakshow editing and Simon Cowell’s fat jokes, wanting to bring it all back. Likewise, Ayesha Erotica’s own nostalgia for the McBling era comes complete, in attitude as well as aesthetics. You have the Juicy tracksuits and the hot pink; you have the hyperbrandedness and the “ironic” bodyshaming (“you’re a size too big, bitch”). Listening to this feels like languishing, My Year of Rest and Relaxation-style, in a sensory deprivation tank filled with expired Four Loko and pumped-in static, papered entirely in US Weekly spreads and Perez Hilton blog posts. Knowing that this was the desired effect, and that people liked it enough to exhume the demo from the Internet graveyard and make it a viral hit, feels like emerging from the chamber to find out that, while you were under, the outside world became like that too.
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Michelle Myers: It’s not easy to be an edgegirlie while also doing it for “the queens and the queers.”
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Nortey Dowuona: When the synth arpeggios start playing over light keyboard chords, the song jitters and frizzles, struggling to figure out a destination. The thick, heavy 808s are layered down surrounded by rigid hi hat lines and settle it, as Ayesha’s smug, high-pitched snarl kicks solid B-minus punchlines over the the flat Tostitos snares. Then the arpeggios appear again, but Ayesha rolls them around her palm, unmoved, unthreatened, sitting just in the bottom of the mix, cutting through all the same. Best Yummy song ever. not much competition for that though.
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Ian Mathers: “Righteous” on its own has some great sounds but does feel kind of… backdrop-y? “Yummy” meanwhile already worked really well, but submerging the vocals below that thick, fuzzy bed of synths works kind of astoundingly well. The parts are good, and the sum? Well, then sum!
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David Moore: How on earth does this make me feel older than any other song we’re covering this year? I feel at least as old as I did relistening to Avenue D, which is what this will sound like in 20 years.
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Brad Shoup: The original is good bloghouse revival (the desiccated “Paul Revere” rip is canceled out by the “what if Biggie was a zoomer” hook); the remix is bloghouse being banished into a nether realm, with a death-row appeal to the queens and the queers at the end.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: The beat anesthetizes and de-aestheticizes the original, flattening the pomp and bombast into spiritless slot-machine synths. I’m not sure why so much hyperactive stuff is labeled “internet music” — most of my late-night scrolling is closer to this: comforting and questionable mindlessness.
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Jonathan Bradley: In some distant future of colossal Amazon warehouses baked by climate change, where interstate highways, grown sentient with misplaced circuitry, curl their tentacles around Cybertrucks fed on large language models, this mash-up will play on flickering loop, scattered proof of a world that once was. “Remember the internet?” we’ll ask one another. “It sounded like this.”
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Taylor Alatorre: The unremixed original doesn’t repulse me despite being contrived to do so, so why can’t I vibe with this one? I think it’s because the newly applied backing track feels like the background radiation of the internet — put almost any song up against it and it would come out sounding basically the same, provided you push the vocals as far below the chiptune-gaze as has been done here. It’s not uniquely tailored to Ayesha Erotica’s performance in a way that uncovers some new angle to it, and it’s not absurdly mismatched in a way that produces either friction or frisson. It just is, anonymous and idle, defanged of its bite but still containing enough narrowcasted filth to briefly snag your focus before you scroll on to the next thing.
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Alfred Soto: I’ve waited a year for a line like “I’m just tryna keep all the porn stars fed” to slap me sideways, and I’m still waiting for a tune worthy of it.
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Micha Cavaseno: A little less than 20 years ago, a certain branch of sleaze rap done (mostly) by white people existed for blogs, MySpace pages, and very little else. It was usually done by people rapping over the mess and miasma of realms we called electroclash, “blog-haus” and other assorted noises. Later, it resulted in LMFAO and Ke$ha, and we nearly disposed of the “ironically bad” rapper thing, which was better for our ears but worse for this little thread where you had people who were “cringe” but not nearly as tedious as your pseudy “undie” of the ’00s nor the far more cursed sea of frat rappers to later come along. It might’ve been self-sabotaged by irony and a disregard from the source culture (except from SpankRock and Dirt Nasty), but it was oddly honest and pure for how little it Needed urban posture. Ayesha Erotica’s fembot “hyperpop” (or hyper-femme BotPop?) dilettante rap is in many ways a return to that but displays a remarkable capability that Princess Superstar just never got close to, Uffie was never interested in pulling off, and Peaches just was never good enough to come close to. She means it, and she does her best to deliver it with the flow and aggression that dares to help edge her away from leather pants and disaffection to unabashed stunting. It just so happens that some generous soul put it over this instrumental and gave us maybe one of a handful of actually listenable “rage” tracks since the sub-genre happened (next to “Miss The Rage,” and Youngboy’s attempts this year). There’s nothing I love more than watching a dead end give way to an unfinished road.
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