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. 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.