Two anime girls with animal ears beneath a full moon in a Fuyunagi illustration linked to the Rockefeller Street meme

Rockefeller Street

2011viral videoclassic

Published October 8, 2026

Rockefeller Street is Estonia's 2011 Eurovision entry by Getter Jaani that found a bizarre second life as a Nightcore remix soundtracking a viral video of two Japanese Osu! players dancing in their chairs. The clip bounced around YouTube and 4chan for years before exploding on TikTok in late 2018 as the backbone of the #showtimechallenge duet trend.

tiktok sound trends dance memes delayed virality memes earworm memes song remix memes

Overview

Rockefeller Street started as a straight pop song written by Sven Lohmus and performed by Estonian singer Getter Jaani at the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest, where it placed 24th1. The meme life of the track has almost nothing to do with the original performance and almost everything to do with a pitched-up Nightcore remix set to anime art from the doujin artbook Fuyunagi, published by the Ice to Choco circle in 20102.

The recognizable format is twofold: the sped-up chorus ("1273 down to Rockefeller Street") paired with a specific chair dance where arms shoot diagonally up on alternating sides, repeated and remixed with moves from other TikTok trends like Default Dance, The Floss, Shoot Dance and Orange Justice2. Users mostly encounter it as a looping sound clip under duet chains rather than as the full Jaani single.

Origin & Background

Platform
Eurovision (song) / YouTube (Nightcore remix) / TikTok (viral spread)
Creator
Unknown
Date
2011

The song's YouTube trail began on January 9th, 2011, when Moonwalkstudio uploaded the official track; the video had picked up more than 2 million views by late 20183. On July 21st, 2011, an Osu! player going by Andrea uploaded a Nightcore remix to his YouTube channel andrea1992rw and three days later submitted a beatmap of the song to the rhythm game2. The remix was re-uploaded by TheNightcoreWitcher on September 16th, 2011, which is the version most meme audiences actually hear2.

The meme video itself came almost three years later. On January 1st, 2014, YouTuber na k posted a clip of two Japanese men playing Osu! and chair-dancing to the Nightcore remix under the title "新年明けたからosuときちがい"4. The video drifted between unlisted and unavailable states over the years but still racked up over 3 million views, and was later re-uploaded by CatHoward in March 2015 and by Chan Ylyl in July 2015, who noted he had pulled it off 4chan's /gif/ board2.

How It Spread

The Osu! chair-dance clip was the real seed. After na k's 2014 upload drifted around YouTube and 4chan, parody uploads kept it alive: on November 26th, 2015, a college anime club filmed a group rendition that passed 468,000 views, and on July 16th, 2017, YouTuber Berd posted an animated version that cleared 950,000 views2.

TikTok is where it actually broke. User @zee.456 uploaded a reusable segment of the Nightcore remix on September 11th, 2016, and by late 2018 duet chains imitating the Osu! chair-dance had turned it into one of the dominant sounds on the app2. YouTuber Shi compiled a duet-chain video on October 26th, 20185, and on November 6th BosMosVok ranked Rockefeller Street among TikTok's top meme songs6. By June 2019 the #rockefellerstreet hashtag had passed 84 million views, with over 2.3 million videos using the @zee.456 sound2.

The attention reached Getter Jaani herself. On December 14th, 2018, she released an official "Rockefeller Street (New Nightcore Remix)"2, gave an interview about the song's meme afterlife on Eesti Television in January 2019, and performed it as a guest at the Eesti Laul 2019 finals7. TikTok formalized the dance into the #showtimechallenge trend in January 2019, which pulled in another 43.8 million views by that June2.

Timeline

2014-01-01

YouTuber na k uploads "新年明けたからosuときちがい", the Osu! chair-dance video that becomes the viral clip[4].

2016-09-11

TikTok user @zee.456 posts a reusable sample of the Nightcore chorus to the app[2].

2018-12-14

Getter Jaani releases an official "Rockefeller Street (New Nightcore Remix)"[2].

How to Use This Meme

The common convention is a TikTok duet: the user films themselves doing the chair-dance (arms diagonally up, side to side, double tap, repeat) in sync with the Nightcore chorus, often splicing in moves from other dance memes. Longer duet chains stack multiple users doing their own variation on the same loop, and the audio is typically the @zee.456 sample rather than the full song.

Frequently Asked Questions