Crab Rave

About

"Crab Rave" is a house song composed by Irish electronic music producer Noisestorm and released by Monstercat in 2018. Since its initial release, the song and its video have seen use in mashups, video edits and remixes, along with adding unfitting captions to the tone of the video.

Origin

On April 1st, 2018, electronic music label Monstercat released the song Crab Rave by Irish producer Eoin O'Broin, also known as Noisestorm, with an accompanying music video uploaded to their Instinct Youtube channel as a part of their April Fools campaign. The music video depicts a cast of crabs dancing and raving to the song on a remote island in the ocean. As of August 11th, 2018, the video has garnered nearly 1.2 million views and is currently the most viewed video on the channel.

Spread

The video later appeared in remix memes on YouTube. For example, a video posted by TheOnlyPixel19 mixing the song with "This Is America" gained over 20,000 views (shown below, left). A Call of Duty mix posted May 24th by Ash100HD gained over 26,000 views (shown below, right).

On July 20th, 2018, YouTuber apandah posted a video on his Twitter account featuring a snippet of the music video with a bass boosted version of the song with the caption "Obama is Gone" in the video. The tweet has amassed 2.3k likes as of August 11th, 2018 (mirror below).

The same video would be posted on the subreddit /r/okbuddyretard on July 23rd, 2018, garnering 708 upvotes^[1]. Multiple variations of the video would pop up the next few weeks, often following the same format of an absurd quote, often in an ironic context, as the crabs dance in the background. On August 11th, 2018, a similar version of the video was posted on /r/me_irl with the caption "Please Julia I Love You", amassing 2.5K upvotes.^[2]

Rush Limbaugh's Death

On February 17th, 2021, controversial conservative radio talkshow host Rush Limbaugh due to complications with lung cancer. Following his death, many online began posting videos of the Crab Rave and crab emojis (🦀) as a means of celebration of the broadcaster's death. Comedian Jaboukie Young-White tweeted ^[3] the earliest know version, retweeting Glenn Beck's tribute to Limbaugh and added the video of the Crab Rave. The tweet received more than 390,000 views, 40,000 likes and 6,500 retweets in less than one week (shown below).

That day, a number of left-leaning subreddits shared memes and articles about Limbaugh's death, adding crab emojis to the subject. On February 18th, Redditor X3redditer posted a Grant Gustin Next to Oliver Queen's Grave meme in the /r/dankleft^[4] subreddit in the thread, "🦀 🦀🦀🦀." The post received more than 5,000 points (99% upvoted) in less than one week (shown below, left).

On February 17th, Twitter^[5] user @TiktaalexRoseae tweeted a Google trends graph of search interest in the Crab Rave. They wrote, "You can tell exactly when Rush Limbaugh died using this graph of people searching crab rave on google." The tweet received more than 50,000 likes and 7,000 retweets in less than one week (shown below, right).

Related Memes

Crab Champions

Crab Champions is an upcoming multiplayer video game developed by Irish DJ and indie video game developer Noisestorm. The video game is a spin-off of Noisestorm's viral song Crab Rave and is scheduled for a 2020 release.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References