Darude talking to The Athletic about Sandstorm
Sandstorm was released on Darude’s debut album in October 1999 and started a slow, methodical climb to relevance. Within a year, it was a top-five single on the dance charts and a year later, it had cracked the Billboard Hot 100. It would take another decade, though, for the song to begin to engrain itself in the cultural ether, largely buoyed by its use in viral videos in the early days of YouTube.
It crossed the bridge from millennials to zoomers (Gen Z) by becoming a legitimate meme on Twitch, where wildly popular esports gamers would either use the song or intentionally misidentify whatever they were listening to as “Darude, by Sandstorm.” By 2010, it had sold 500,000 copies. By 2020, it had gone platinum.
It had also slowly crept into the sporting world. First, in Finland, where it would be used from time to time as an arena anthem of sorts. Then, during a pair of successive Olympic games in the mid- and late-2000s, swimmer Michael Phelps used it during warm-ups for his races.
Others adopted the tune: MMA great Wanderlei Silva made it his entrance song, while a host of college basketball and football teams have used the track to whip students into a frenzy. It has been used as entrance music for relief pitchers and warm-up music for soccer and American football teams.
Maybe most notably, the track was adopted by the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, who have used it during college football games since 2008. Needing a defensive stop on fourth down late in a game against conference rival Ole Miss in 2009, the in-house DJ at South Carolina’s Williams-Brice Stadium dropped Sandstorm. The scene, preserved all these years later on YouTube, is something to behold.
Its popularity at South Carolina has only grown over the years, having become the team’s unofficial anthem. Last year, the school invited Virtanen to play the song live during a game against Kentucky. As the stadium lights dimmed and the strobe lights came on, the scene at Williams-Brice looked less like the American south and more like an electronic music festival in Eastern Europe.
“I had my own surreal, 80,000-fan moment with the Gamecocks,” says Virtanen. “That was pretty incredible. I’d heard and seen some videos but then being there myself — going down to the field and meeting the players and the coach and experiencing the full ‘American football experience’ … It was mind blowing.”
The song now has 279 million views on YouTube and nearly half a billion plays on Spotify. Virtanen attributes much of the track’s staying power to its simplicity in design. His lack of formal training in music, he sometimes says, might give his music an appeal that other trance or techno artists don’t get across.
“One thing that I can say,” says Virtanen, “Is that it’s interesting that Sandstorm is so repetitive, but for whatever reason — and I have no idea why — it doesn’t get irritating. And that is the key, I don’t know why. It’s so recognizable, you hear like the first half-second and you know what’s coming.”
Sandstorm has become so ubiquitous at this point that many consider it a joke, or listen to it with a knowing wink of sorts. To others, it might encapsulate their feelings about techno or trance music in general, held up as the exemplar of an entire genre or subset of music that they disdain.
Virtanen doesn’t much care. He’s not bothered by why anyone is listening, whether they’re driven by sarcasm, irony or just a genuine love for his track. What matters is that they’re listening at all.
“In the United States, it’s so huge and varied,” says Virtanen. “You have rednecks in one part of the country, hippies over in some other part. Of course they are not all gonna like dance music. That’s very understandable that some people might be like ‘this electronic BS is playing again.’ But the coolest thing for me is that it seems like overwhelmingly it is still this positive thing.
“This undeniable energy that the track creates at a mass event, that’s a cool thing for me to witness.”
(Top photo: Hector Vivas/Getty Images)
Source link : https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5618920/2024/07/06/copa-america-sandstorm-unofficial-anthem/
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Publish date : 2024-07-06 09:29:51
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