TheFatRat
Luke is eight.
I love talking to the little kids. They answer you honestly, they miss the nuance, they’re fountains of information presented unfiltered and when Luke told me he was listening to TheFatRat I had no idea what he was talking about.
He immediately told me he’d found him on his favorite YouTube channel, featuring an explanation of his favorite video game.
And at this point he handed it off to his older sister Annabelle, who’s twelve, he credited her for the sleuthing. And she told me all about AnimalJam, turned out the whole family was into AnimalJam, an online game that’s addictive. It dominated breakfast discussion, so even their father Brady saddled up and got hooked. And then Luke pulled out the iPad and attached it to a speaker that looked like a panda and he played me his favorite FatRat tune…
It had 75 million views on YouTube.
I started to research. I pulled up TheFatRat in Spotify and quizzed dear Luke.
He knew every song within seconds, if it took that long, even the name of the EP!
That’s the power of YouTube, that’s the power of children, that’s the power of electronic music.
Yes, they couldn’t put a moniker on it, but that’s what it was, they were dancing around the driveway to the beat. They showed me a clip of TheFatRat creating video game music.
That’s the era we live in today. One wherein kids find it themselves, not on radio, but on the internet. Where they’re not cloistered by what’s in the orchestra and not limited by radio. Where they find what feels good and they go deeper than we ever could.
This is the modern world.
TheFatRat-“Unity”-75,216,059 views
