How Cardi B’s Off-the-Cuff Video Became a Coronavirus Anthem

It started as a 46-second monologue. It got remixed into a dancey track. Now the rapper and the D.J. who transformed her clip are promising it’ll help the needy.

Cardi B admitted she’s scared of the coronavirus in a video posted to her Instagram last week. It got remixed into a hit song.

Last Wednesday, the unfiltered entertainer Cardi B posted a short video letting her 60 million Instagram followers know how she felt about the topic on everyone’s minds: the Covid-19 outbreak. “Let me tell y’all something, I ain’t even gonna front,” she said in the profanity-laden 46 seconds. “A bitch is scared. I’m a little scared.”
Clad in a transparent chain-link dress, she questioned the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, expounded on the delay in retail items being shipped from overseas and warned her followers to take the threat seriously. In closing, she chuckled a cartoon villain’s throaty laugh and moved to the beat of her own voice as she let out an ominous but oddly musical cry: “Coronavirus! Coronavirus! I’m telling you, [expletive] is real! [Expletive] is gettin’ real!”

Several days later, a Brooklyn D.J. and producer who goes by DJ iMarkkeyz saw his fans tagging him in the video’s comments with a familiar request: “you know what to do.” To his 150,000 followers on Instagram, iMarkkeyz is known for “remixing” memes and viral clips. (He recently made a song from Chaka Khan’s acrobatic rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner during last month’s N.B.A. All-Star game.) As he said in an email interview, he makes between four and seven beats a day on Ableton, and he already had a particularly hot one that fit the cadence of Cardi saying “coronavirus.”

“When people tagged me in that vid, I [was] already chopp[ing] it all together in my head,” he said. And thus the uber-timely “Coronavirus Remix” was born. Seemingly overnight, it has gone vir — well, you know.

Absurd times call for absurd tunes. With the live-music industry on pause and upcoming release dates potentially in limbo, the music industry is in crisis. And so the antic and unlikely “Coronavirus (Remix)” has become a fitting anthem for these unsettled times; it sounds like being inside a five-alarm fire of the mind. It is one of the only songs that makes any kind of sense to my brain right now. And people all over the world seem to agree.

“Coronavirus Remix” has been steadily rising on download charts worldwide. It has hit No. 1 on iTunes in Bulgaria, Egypt and, most recently, Brazil. (“It’s pretty much everywhere lmao,” DJ iMarkkeyz wrote.) It has just cracked the Top 10 of the U.S. iTunes chart, one slot below Harry Styles’s hit “Adore You.”

A video of the song being played in a Rio club has been making the rounds. DJ Snake made a remix. Miley Cyrus and her boyfriend, Cody Simpson, posted their own parody in tribute. A musician on TikTok recorded a note-for-note piano interpretation of Cardi’s musings. An unofficial #CoronavirusChallenge has ignited on social video platforms, with many dancers donning face masks.

Though initially perplexed by the song’s growth, Cardi has embraced her accidental anthem (“I might [as] well do a damn music video,” she tweeted). And with her support, her massive social media following is likely to make “Coronavirus Remix” an even bigger hit. On Tuesday, DJ iMarkkeyz said on Twitter that donating proceeds from the track was his goal, and Cardi reinforced it: “We will Donate!”

Cardi, born Belcalis Almanzar, was a reality show star and an Instagram personality before she broke through as a rapper, and in some sense her musical career has flowed directly from the melodious and hooky quality of her most meme-able moments. When a melodramatic clip of her on “Love & Hip Hop” became a viral sensation (“If a girl has beef with me, she gon’ have beef with me … forever”), she leaned into it by sampling the line on her early track “Foreva.”

As she’s risen to fame, Cardi has remained outspoken in her politics. Her wildly entertaining Instagram account has been home to her off-the-cuff speeches about topics like President Trump and the income tax. (She has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president.) Days after her coronavirus video, she also posted a clip of herself cackling at a Trump news conference.

“My first goal was for people to enjoy it,” DJ iMarkkeyz said. “My other goal was to show Cardi that she has people who love her to death just by being herself. With all this happening, it shows the impact that Cardi has on everyone all across the world.”