“At first I was kind of overwhelmed,” Roach says of the clip’s sudden popularity, which he didn’t see coming—just as he didn’t see the quarantine coming. “I was paranoid that nobody was going to know that it was [created by] me.” He had reason to worry. “There were some people that were using the sound and not tagging me—like, using the actual sound,” he says. “So, I was very paranoid about it. But then I had to step back and be like, ‘Oh, it’s still my voice, they’re going to find out either way. It’s still my voice.’ ”
Then Roach got lucky. Two weeks after he posted the song, Tyga posted his version. “He was one of the first celebrities to use it,” he says. The next day, Tyga messaged him on Instagram, and things went from there. “He was like, ‘Yo, I got this beat,’ and I didn’t know if he was expecting me to just put the chord down, and then he’d put a verse down, but I just put a verse down and sent it to him. The next day, he sent his verse to me. Then, later that week, the song was out and it was everywhere.”
Twenty-two-year-old Boman Martinez-Reid, known as Bomanizer on TikTok, recently graduated from Ryerson University, where he majored in radio and television arts, and moved back to his parents’ house in Toronto. While still in high school, he created a show with his friends called Reid It and Weep. “It was a reality show that was just about me and me having problems,” he says. “Nobody watched it. We were just doing it because it was fun. It was silly. It was exciting. Our friends at school watched it, but that was kind of it.” He continued the show into college but eventually let it go. Then, last October, he was at a friend’s house watching Vanderpump Rules, and it gave him an idea.