FADE IN:
INT. GAMING LOUNGE/SHORTFORM CLIP GENERATION FACTORY
SUGAR sits in swively gaming chair. Dark headphones bob atop poofy red hair. A small dark couch lingers in the back, housing what appears to be Lays chips and maybe a Cheez-It parcel.
SUGAR: GG fucking easy.
Cut to KAIEN, also headphone-encased, in a dark gaming chair outlined with red. Glasses and a soccer jersey are involved. In lieu of chips, his dimly-lit room is full of absence, material and spiritual.
KAIEN: Hey, don’t say that!
SUGAR: Ehe, really?
Zoom into SUGAR’s face; anime speed lines surround her as she scrunches up her cheeks.
SUGAR: FURKIN’ EASY!
These seven seconds have become probably the most-consumed seven seconds of audiovisual entertainment in the last week of Earth. The original X clip of the music video has over 70 million views, and dozens of quote tweets of that post also have millions of views. Somehow, someway, a seemingly innocuous clip of a normal-looking woman saying internet slang (“gg ez” is often used by sweaty tryhards after they humiliate an opponent in, say, Valorant or League of Legends) has repulsed, intoxicated, and puzzled a vast swath of the internet.
The music and video are really not that sickening. Maybe even a little endearing. The way they trade lines and whoop over the beat simulates the adrenaline rush of a quick move in a game. It has the same cartoonish innocence of digicore OG SEBii’s RhymeZone raps. The video is practically just a rawr XD visual tic—rather than say the expletive, the woman goes for the “furking.” It’s perfectly calibrated Broad City-humor ragebait.
Let’s backtrack a bit. The song, called “GG EZ,” was released by a mysterious artist named M.Sasuke in May. It spawned a dance trend in the K- and J-pop worlds with idols like BTS’ Jung Kook and iTZY’s Yeji, which was controversial because fans of these artists quickly clocked the tinny glimmer of AI in the robotic vocals. Sure enough, M.Sasuke soon admitted that the song was made with AI.
Fast forward to late August: Enter Kaien Nuen, an influencer-musician fluent in four languages, and Angelina “Sugar” Zhang, a cover artist and cosplayer who recently graduated from the University of Toronto. They got permission from M.Sasuke and remade the song with their own mewls. The full 153 seconds of their “GG EZ” remake follows Joseph Campbell’s classic hero’s journey. It’s a love-hate narrative of toxic love, filtered through the prism of Discord geeks who can’t stop saying shit like “oneshot” and “low HP.” Besides a pop of Jersey club and a crescendoing final bit, it’s pretty much the same lowkey synths and mouse-click drums the whole time. Kaien’s character begins as an average gamer, who tides himself over with a few skin purchases and Valorant wins. Then she arrives: the gigachad femme fatale ready to unseat him from his pedestal. “Boy, I'm in my zone, stop calling my phone,” she asserts. By the end, Kaien has learned his lesson: There are no “free passes” when it comes to indissoluble matrimony. “Typin’ GG, My life so bright like VV,” he concludes.
It originally gained traction on X as part of a joke where musicians pretended they had produced the song. Then it became a mix of people thirsting after Sugar and saying things like “Nuke all valorant servers immediately.” Users overlaid the video with Geordie Greep songs and flipped OsamaSon’s “Werkin” into GG EZ rageslop and compared the track to “Ninajirachi pre girl edm” and made crazed edits just a week too late for my stutter column. The professional eSports team Sentinels cashed in, while League of Legends legend Doublelift declared that it should be Valorant’s official theme. In one clip, Kaien and Sugar morph into Adolf Hitler and Charlie Kirk, of course. Digicore artists gunk, zayok, and edyn made a remix so fine it’s like brushing your ear on a charmeuse gown.
I DMed zayok to understand the mind-state they were in when sculpting the remix. “The original song has this fake whimsy to it where it’s like, farking easy. What’s really cool about ours is that we play it straight. We don’t treat the original like it’s horrible,” he says. “I don’t like the original song, but I think if you try hard enough, you can make the worst things good with art and real human emotion. Me and my friends were dicking around and made something truly beautiful.”
A lot of internet users took a less generous and generative approach. Some of the hate clearly comes from the fact that “GG EZ” is just sleek enough to be listenable, while the subject matter microwaves stale flaps of internet culture à la “Pokémon Go to the polls!” Zoomers might also see a reflection of themselves, or their younger Fortnite-brained selves, that they now find embarrassing. But a lot of the backlash is also just racist and misogynistic, and there’s a flood of gross incel behavior around the video.
More intriguing than “GG EZ” is the kind of new “service” Kaien and Sugar provide. Since last year, Kaien has specialized in vocal and instrumental covers of Brazilian phonk, the mega-popular slop genre of turbo-distorto techno popular in aura mogging compilations. In one clip, he got a musician to do a live zither phonk remix; another video covers the insipid genre with a dizzying array of instruments from piano to erhu to dizi to violin to saxophone to guzheng to suona. He’s essentially humanizing inhuman music, and “GG EZ” is a step beyond that: reworking a popular AI song so it’s more “ethical,” lifelike, distinctly offbeat. As online music degrades into a wasteland of passive-listening prompts, maybe these dippy covers and trash-genres-turned-tasteful edits will become in vogue.
- At the Ben Doctor party at Nightclub 101, a fog-lathered duo who I was later informed were the Femcels played a brostep remix of “Somebody That I Used to Know.”
- After catching up with my favorite Instagram rap news page owners at the Welcome.JPEG party at dim sum hall Golden Unicorn, my friend and I got beers and hit the dancefloor for B0YG1RL. It was so fire that he dropped his Tsingtao. For some reason I was wearing sandals, so I got a bunch of glass in my toe and had to wedge some napkins in between the sandal toe thongs to prevent myself from bleeding out.
- I got redemption the next day. Nobody at Le Bain on Saturday was in the chlamydia pool because they were too busy smashing up and down to an unchained B0YG1RL set (you might as well rename FW to the B0YG1RL tour with the amount of lineups they’re on).