Where did Crab Rave come from?

Monstercat released the song and video on April 1, 2018 through the label's Instinct YouTube channel as part of its April Fools' Day rollout.

What does Crab Rave mean?

Online it means celebrating that something bad has happened, often to a public figure the poster disliked.

How do you use Crab Rave?

You typically place a piece of bad news or an absurd caption in front of the video and let the crab dance carry the reaction.

Is Crab Rave still popular?

It hit its biggest cultural moment in February 2021 during the Rush Limbaugh reaction wave and has stayed in rotation as a classic reaction template.

Crab Rave

Q: What is Crab Rave?

A 2018 house track by Irish producer Noisestorm whose music video of dancing crabs became a widely shared celebration meme.

2018viral videoclassic

Published August 17, 2026

Crab Rave is a 2018 house track by Irish producer Noisestorm whose music video of dancing crabs became a widely used celebration meme, especially for gloating over bad news about disliked public figures. The song came out through Monstercat's Instinct channel on April 1, 2018 as part of an April Fools' Day rollout and is still recycled in reaction edits years later.

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Overview

Crab Rave is a 2018 house track by Irish electronic producer Noisestorm whose accompanying music video became a widely used celebration meme1. The clip shows a cast of animated crabs dancing on a tropical beach and turned into online shorthand for gloating when something goes badly for someone else3.

Editors typically pair the crab footage with an ironic caption or a piece of bad news about a public figure, and the format spread across Twitter, YouTube and Reddit through the second half of 2018. Urban Dictionary entries from that period call it 'the best meme in the world,' giving a sense of how fast it hardened into an in-joke in certain online circles2.

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Origin & Background

Platform

YouTube (Monstercat) / Twitter and Reddit (viral spread)

Creator

Noisestorm

Date

2018

Eoin O'Broin, who records as Noisestorm, produced Crab Rave for Canadian electronic label Monstercat. The song and its music video were released on April 1, 2018 through Monstercat's Instinct YouTube channel as part of the label's annual April Fools' Day rollout1. The video shows a cast of crabs dancing and raving on a remote island beach.

How It Spread

Within weeks the video was recut into remix edits on YouTube. A mashup by TheOnlyPixel19 layered Crab Rave over Childish Gambino's 'This Is America' and pulled around 20,000 views, while a Call of Duty edit by Ash100HD posted May 24, 2018 collected roughly 26,0003. On July 20, 2018, YouTuber apandah tweeted a bass-boosted version captioned 'Obama is Gone,' which drew about 2,300 likes; the same clip hit the r/okbuddyretard subreddit three days later with 708 upvotes and locked in the template of an absurd caption over dancing crabs.

The meme took its darkest turn on February 17, 2021, when conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh died of lung cancer complications. Comedian Jaboukie Young-White quote-tweeted Glenn Beck's tribute with the Crab Rave clip, pulling more than 390,000 views and 40,000 likes inside a week3. Left-leaning subreddits piled on with threads full of crab emojis, and Twitter user @TiktaalexRoseae posted a Google Trends graph showing the spike in Crab Rave searches lined up almost exactly with news of Limbaugh's death, pulling more than 50,000 likes.

How to Use This Meme

A typical Crab Rave edit places a caption, screenshot or headline announcing bad news for a disliked figure at the front of the video, then cuts to the crabs going wild when the beat drops. The joke is the celebration itself, so the pettier or more absurd the trigger, the better it usually plays2.