Scroll long enough, and eventually a sound will penetrate the amorphous fog of noise coming from your phone and nestle itself deep into your psyche. Sometimes it arrives attached to AI-generated dramas involving cartoon fruits engaged in soap-opera-esque scandals, which you could charitably describe as Cocomelon for adults. Other sounds, like the German pop song “Gut Genug,” are cut to edits of everything from The Cleveland Show to videos of Steve Lacy singing along. The track had already topped charts in Germany and racked up more than 17 million Spotify streams in under a month, but on American feeds, most users encountering it have no idea who made it, what the lyrics mean, or even what language it’s in. They simply recognize the feeling.

Across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, a growing number of songs from wildly different genres and countries have escaped their original context entirely. A Philadelphia drill anthem became attached to a meme so popular that not even His Holiness could escape it. A Brazilian funk beat became inseparable from anthropomorphic fruit. A German pop song is currently the soundtrack to feel-good videos in every language. An Azerbaijani duet sung in Russian has racked up millions of plays from listeners who may never learn the artists’ names.

The result are global hits whose most famous form may be a fragment, or snippet, rather than the song itself. Inside the feed, that fragment becomes a reusable emotional cue, recognizable to millions who may never hear the full track or learn who made it.

For Skrilla, the Philadelphia rapper behind “6-7,” the meme’s reach has become so vast that it can feel detached from the song that started it. Asked about seeing Pope Leo XIV perform the signature hand gesture, Skrilla doesn’t sound particularly surprised. “Yeah, I seen him do it a couple times,” he says. “6-7 is kind of bigger than me now.”

What began as a regionally popular rap record has since become one of the defining sounds of the algorithm era. That hand gesture can now be spotted everywhere from sports clips to classrooms to videos filmed thousands of miles from the city that produced it.

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Some of that attention, Skrilla says, has carried listeners into the rest of his catalog. “People listening to my other music kind of make them grasp onto me more,” he says. “All my music doesn’t sound the same. It’s not all ‘6-7.’”

Skrilla believes the song’s success also helped introduce a broader audience to Philadelphia’s distinctive production style. “Everybody does Philly type beats,” he says. “It’s a good thing, though. But it’s kind of global now.”

The reach is something he’s experienced firsthand while traveling. On a recent trip to Brazil, Skrilla says he encountered children who recognized him despite language barriers and geographic distance.

“A lot of the kids know who I am now,” he says. “They don’t even speak English.”

For an artist who grew up in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, that kind of recognition remains difficult to process. “It’s a blessing from where I come from,” he says.

The Azerbaijani singer EMIN’s song has crossed linguistic borders, too. “Kamin,” a duet with fellow artist JONY, was already a major hit across parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia when it was released in 2020. Years later, the Russian-language ballad found an entirely new audience through an unlikely vehicle: AI-generated fruit videos.

“I personally never thought that it’s going to be a big hit for us,” EMIN says. “But every year it just became more and more popular. Instagram has picked it up, TikTok has picked it up.”

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At first, he didn’t even realize what was happening. “People started basically sending me these videos,” he says. “I didn’t even know what they mean. To me, it was a completely new world.”

The pairing sounds silly on paper. “Kamin” is a melancholy song about heartbreak and longing. The videos feature anthropomorphic fruits navigating absurdist romantic betrayals. Yet somehow the combination clicked. “The song has some sadness to it and those fruits, there’s drama in it,” EMIN says. “I think the song makes it a perfect fit.”

Part of the appeal, he believes, is that the melody works independently of language: “That melody was so captivating for people that it became one of the most used tracks for reels and videos.” At the peak of the trend, EMIN says his and JONY’s YouTube channels collectively generated roughly 850 million monthly listens. More importantly, he says, audiences weren’t just listening to one viral song: “They’re actually going through your entire catalog.”

Unlike artists attempting to engineer their next viral moment, EMIN views the success as something that happened organically. “If we sit down together with JONY today and say, ‘Let’s do another one that could be just as good,’ I think it’s going to be very difficult,” he says. “We were more lucky than by design.”

DJ Guh Mix, the Brazilian producer behind “Medley de Igaratá 3,” tapped into a similarly charmed sound. The song’s spacious production lets its piercing saxophone riffs dissipate into silence, only for borderline obnoxious horns to swirl them back into rhythm. The groove passes between them without ever quite resolving, each jolt followed by a pocket of silence that feels almost taunting. It is the quintessential earworm: Listening to it feels like scratching some auditory itch buried deep in the space between one’s subconscious and whatever firmament these apples and trifling strawberries occupy.

Long before many users knew the song’s name, its beat had become inseparable from the fruit-video universe. “It started with people from different places, including people in the music industry, following me and sending me DMs,” Guh Mix says. “Some were praising the song and others were proposing collaborations.”

He was surprised not just by the scale of the song’s spread, but by the variety of contexts in which it appeared. “I was surprised seeing this track being used in so many different situations,” he adds. “It showed the power the internet has, strengthening funk culture.”

Like EMIN, he believes language mattered less than feeling. “I believe the instrumental played a fundamental role,” he says. “Even people who don’t understand the lyrics can feel the energy and intensity of the track.”

The producer points directly to the fruit-video ecosystem that helped propel the song. “There was a meme with the fruits, Abacatudo and Moranguete,” he says. “It was everywhere on social media and the music was always there.” Yet he also sees a tension at the heart of the phenomenon. The same AI videos introducing listeners to new music can also obscure the people who made it. “I believe AI videos help a lot in discovering new songs,” he says. “At the same time, it’s important that people know who’s behind the work.”

The feed’s latest hit, “Gut Genug,” was absorbed into the internet’s emotional vocabulary almost immediately. The song itself was anything but immediate. Blumengarten singer Rayan and producer Sammy recorded an early demo roughly two years ago for their first album, then left it on a hard drive when they couldn’t figure out how to finish it. When the group KITSCHKRIEG asked the duo to send over material for a new project, the forgotten song was tucked into the batch.

“We immediately knew this was super special,” KITSCHKRIEG’s Fiji Kris says. He and Fizzle built a new track around Rayan’s vocal, then invited Shirin David, one of Germany’s biggest rap stars, to add a verse. The collaborators realized the song was moving beyond Germany only after misreading a flood of notifications. KITSCHKRIEG had held a cinema screening for their album in Cologne, and the next morning Fizzle assumed the tags filling the group’s account were reactions from the audience.

“Then we checked, and it was all Americans in the comments,” he says. “That’s when we realized, ‘Oh shit, something is happening on ‘Gut Genug,’ and it’s happening overseas.’”

For Blumengarten, whose audience had largely been concentrated in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the attention was entirely new. Rayan says the song made the duo bigger at home while making him recognizable abroad. During a recent trip to New York, he was stopped on the street nearly every day. Back home, a routine supermarket run turned into something closer to a meet-and-greet.

“At one point there were probably 30 or 40 kids and every employee from the supermarket who wanted to take a picture with me while I was just trying to get cold cuts of meat for my sandwich,” he says.

The meme’s most obvious engine is Rayan’s voice. Fizzle, who has worked with artists in the United States for years, describes his tone as singular even on an international level. The chorus rises into a falsetto that can carry urgency, comfort, and humor before a listener understands a single word.

“It’s really nice to see that this connects over language barriers,” Fizzle says.

The words themselves translate to “You are good enough,” which is almost like icing on the cake. The track is meant to be as uplifting as it sounds. Rayan says that the message grew out of Blumengarten’s own experiences with mental health and the reason he and his bandmate began making music in the first place.

“It’s just baked into everything that we do to spread hope,” he says. “Writing something like ‘You are good enough’ is just super natural.”

Online, sincerity is only one of the chorus’s available meanings. English-speaking listeners have treated the German words as a phonetic toy, while Rayan’s voice and appearance have invited comparisons to the animated character Cleveland Brown Jr. He is not particularly bothered. “I pretty much am eight hours a day on my phone,” he says. “I laugh at every single one. It’s just part of internet culture, I guess.”

But the clips also flatten the song. Most of them end before David’s verse, which Rayan describes as an unusually introspective account of her life as a superstar. International listeners often do not know who she is or understand the personal context behind what she is saying.

“A lot of the context of the song gets lost in translation,” he says. “On one side we are very happy about the praise it gets, but on the other side, it’s kind of sad to see that people don’t really understand the verse.”

Fiji Kris sees the loss and the discovery happening at once. He has watched listeners translate David’s verse after first encountering the chorus as a meme. The part most easily detached from the song can still become an entry point to the rest of it.

The numbers suggest that some listeners are making that jump. Rayan says streams have risen across nearly every song in Blumengarten’s catalog, helped by the fortunate timing of a new project released the same week “Gut Genug” exploded. Musicians that the group once considered unreachable have sent messages of support, and Steve Lacy posted himself singing along to the chorus.

The attention has also traveled back in the direction it came from. Fiji Kris says German kids closely follow American creators, so seeing the song embraced in the United States gave it “a different cultural meaning in Germany as well.” The international meme did not simply export a German record; it helped reintroduce the record to Germany as something newly important.

The death of the monoculture has felt like a foregone conclusion. Everyone now has feeds personalized to their individual desires. But a different kind of universal culture might be developing in the brain-rot era, where memes become so malleable that they travel effortlessly between algorithmic niches and subcultures. So much so that, eventually, no matter what side of the internet you’re on, everyone will know the same buzzing German pop hit. 

Fizzle reaches back to the German band Nena’s global 1983 hit “99 Luftballons” as precedent for “Gut Genug.” “If you go back to the foundation of what music is, emotions and feelings, it really makes sense,” he says. “If you do something right and it has a good and positive emotion, it connects with people all over the world.”

In the Eighties, a hit could be broadcast into millions of homes through a handful of radio stations and television channels. Now the glowing screen sits in each person’s hand, and every feed insists that its user is seeing something different. Yet after years of fragmentation, culture may be bending back toward a common language, one rooted in a shared instinct.

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For all that momentum, Blumengarten is not rushing to erase the language barrier. Rayan says he would never re-record the chorus in English, because it would feel wrong. The collaborators are working on a remix that could add an English verse from an American artist, but the part that the internet already recognizes will remain in German.

“We are not trying to force an international career now,” Rayan says. “We just see what comes and go with the flow.”