How TikTok Fell So Deeply in Love With a Janet Jackson Track from 2001
How can we meet at a bar if you keep raising it, Ms. Jackson? Janet Jackson’s 2001 track “Someone to Call My Lover” is experiencing a resurgence on TikTok. Currently sitting at No. 26 on the TikTok “Viral 50” chart, that’s still been enough to dramatically raise the song’s stats. Per Billboard and Luminate, the song has seen a 606 percent surge in streams over the past four weeks, including 1.14 million on-demand U.S. streams from March 14 to 20. Doechii is among the many fans who have tweeted the song lyrics in the past month, though she’s the only one who got an affectionate reply from Jackson’s account. The fact that people have fallen so deeply in love with this irresistibly upbeat bop is not surprising, but why the slow burn? Why now?
Sometimes, a spike in the online popularity of an older song can be pretty easily traced to a specific moment — consider, for example, the TikTok of the guy who skated and drank cranberry juice while listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” sending the song back onto the Billboard “Hot 100” for the first time in more than 40 years. But it’s harder to pinpoint a single viral post that propelled “Someone to Call My Lover” to its current virality. Instead, the digital foundations for this moment appear to have been building for a while. From a Soundcloud remix that became a fan-edit favorite to animal fun-fact videos to TikToks calling the track a “quirky Black-girl bop,” here’s a timeline piecing together as much as we could find about the online trajectory that led to “Someone to Call My Lover” having another moment 24 years after its release.
The beginning
2001: Janet Jackson drops the second single for her album All for You on June 12. Titled “Someone to Call My Lover,” it samples the guitar riff from America’s 1972 hit “Ventura Highway.” It is also an interpolation of composer Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” which Jackson first heard in TV commercials growing up. (She tells Yahoo! Music that after years of searching for the classical composition, she randomly heard it while shopping at Ralph Lauren and asked for the store’s CD to bring to producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.) “Someone to Call My Lover” takes “me back to my childhood,” Jackson says. The song peaks at No. 3 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in September, and ultimately spends 20 weeks on the chart.
2004–15: Jackson faces heavy backlash following a wardrobe malfunction with Justin Timberlake at the 2004 Super Bowl. She still goes on to release four more studio albums during this time period. She does not perform “Someone to Call My Lover” on tour.
2017: “Someone to Call My Lover” fans celebrate when Jackson sings it in Ohio on December 3 — it’s her first time performing the song live in concert in more than 15 years, since a 2002 performance in Hawaii.
Enter Soundcloud
2021: On August 13, Soundcloud user @minga57 uploads “Someone to Call My Lover (57 in loving memory edit),” a hardcore-breaks remix of Jackson’s track. It develops a small but enthusiastic fan base, with one Twitter user quipping in November, “statistically, ive heard SOMEONE TO CALL MY LOVER (minga57 in loving memory edit) more than my fathers voice.”
The fan-edit era
2022 and ’23: Minga57’s frenetic “Someone to Call My Lover” remix is being used as the soundtrack for fan edits on TikTok and Twitter. Perhaps because the song is sped up (and/or the fact that audios aren’t always credited on the internet), not everyone who sees these edits initially knows that what they’re hearing is a Jackson track.
hello chat pic.twitter.com/OIW41Bqt38
— rose¹² (@run2hye) October 21, 2023
The remix seems to initially gain traction among K-pop- and anime-fan editors who pair it with transitions between pictures or videos of their faves to create fond showcases like the one above, of K-pop singer Go Won. But its use spreads to other fandoms, as evidenced by the YouTube comments section of a reupload of the track. “I can’t believe a Postal edit brought me here,” one comment says. “For me, it was a Garfield edit of Jon Arbuckle lol,” replies another.
January–August 2024: “Someone to Call My Lover” fan edits are becoming more common, but more editors are now choosing to use either Jackson’s original track or their own slowed-down or sped-up versions of the song. In June, Jackson embarks on the second North American leg of her Together Again tour and includes “Someone to Call My Lover” on the setlist as an encore song. (According to Setlist.fm, this breaks a yearslong hiatus since the last time she performed it in 2019.) Across social-media platforms, most fan edits to the song are still getting a modest amount of views, but the ones posted on TikTok seem to have more reach and a greater chance of attracting thousands of views.
A different type of beast
September–October 2024: @pawsitivitycore, a TikTok account that posts clips of animals to trending songs, goes on a “Someone to Call My Lover” posting streak. This comes after its September 9 fun-fact video about fish takes off, with more than 4 million views to date. Demonstrating an astute understanding of the TikTok algorithm, @pawsitivitycore decides to keep following this formula, pumping out more than a dozen videos using the song by the end of October.
TikTok fan edits are still exposing viewers to “Someone to Call My Lover” throughout the fall; an October 24 edit of Daisuke from the horror game Mouthwashing becomes one of the more popular edits to use the song at nearly 250,000 views to date. But ultimately, human characters are no competition for cute animals, which are now dominating in terms of the engagement on videos that use the song.
November 2024: TikTok user @royal_artangel posts part of the “Someone to Call My Lover” music video on November 11, quipping that Jackson was “pregnant with PinkPantheress” while filming. (The most-liked comment mistakes this comparison of the two artists’ styles as a sincere declaration that they are related.)
That video does well, with 4 million views to date, but @pawsitivitycore’s consistent posting is pushing its content into an entirely different realm of reach. On November 23, the animal account is rewarded with its most viral “Someone to Call My Lover” TikTok to date: a video of a gorilla throwing food that now has more than 25 million views.
December 2024: TikTok user @girlalm1ghty posts a “Someone to Call My Lover” lyric edit on December 9, using a popular style in the vein of Charli XCX’s Brat art. Hashtags on the video, which has more than 340,000 views to date, include #girlcore, #girly, #soft, #fun, #cute, #underrated, and #throwback. As a lyric edit, there are no celebs or fictional characters or animals to focus on; the comments section is discussing the song’s “Ventura Highway” sample, lyrics, and general feel-good effect on a listener.
January–February 2025: “Someone to Call My Lover” is still being used on TikTok as background music, whether that’s for Lizzie McGuire fan edits or for animal videos. (Although @pawsitivitycore’s views are calming down after its gorilla peak, the account still hasn’t given up on the sound.)
‘Quirky Black-girl bop’
February 2025: The use of “Someone to Call My Lover” on TikTok starts to expand to include more people who are posting videos of themselves, which makes the sound a lot more accessible. (Hey, not everyone has hundreds of animal videos in their camera roll or knows how to make fan edits in CapCut or AfterEffects.) This to-camera shift appears to largely be initiated by Black content creators — including several women who are posting TikToks of themselves with captions describing “Someone to Call My Lover” as a bop for “quirky” or “awkward” Black girls. (Multiple commenters interpret the descriptions as a riff on a since-deleted and widely side-eyed video where a white TikToker praised Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Put Your Records On” as a “little Black girl confidence bop.”)
Several other to-camera “Someone to Call My Lover” TikToks go viral throughout the month, notably including a February 18 video of a Starbucks barista vibing behind a cup with the lyrics written on it. (That video currently has 3.8 million views.) Some people are also starting to use the audio as an opportunity to mourn the career trajectory that Jackson might’ve had if not for that infamous Super Bowl incident with Justin Timberlake.
March madness
March 2025: More non-Black content creators are now starting to post to “Someone to Call My Lover,” which is experiencing an exponential growth in popularity across TikTok. A Lipstick Alley forum post noted on February 28 that the song had been used more than 3,500 times. There are now more than 70,000 TikToks under the sound as of publication, including a March 3 video of actress Ariana Greenblatt vibing to the song over a Chipotle bowl. (And that’s only accounting for the official audio; the sped-up version from the December lyric edit alone has been used more than 32,000 times.) In a true sign that this is becoming a trending sound, TikTokers of all niches are trying to cash in on the algorithm, whether that means dancing to the song, roller-skating to it, re-creating its music video, using it to soundtrack everyday moments, or bringing it up via more references to PinkPantheress and “little Black girl” bops.
Jackson (or her social-media team, at least) are noticing this resurgence; her account starts consistently liking and reposting TikToks that use the song. When Doechii tweets a gif of Jackson alongside “Someone to Call My Lover” lyrics on March 22, Jackson replies the very next day with lyrics and a gif of the Swamp Princess.
The online attention is translating to streams, too. “Someone to Call My Lover” enters Spotify’s “Daily Viral Songs USA” chart on March 14 at No. 51 (and rises to No. 25 by March 23). According to updates account @janetdata, “Someone to Call My Lover” gains more than 249,000 Spotify streams on March 25, which makes that the song’s biggest streaming day ever on the platform. The following day, Billboard’s “Chartbeat” column cites Luminate data to report that streams of the track have grown by more than 606 percent over the past four weeks, including 1.14 million on-demand U.S. streams from March 14 to 20.
While it is possible for a song to go viral without people knowing or caring about who the artist is, the interest in “Someone to Call My Lover” seems to be getting directed back at Jackson, too. Throughout March, TikToks of her music videos or of her speaking about her songwriting process are also clearing 100,000 likes, and multiple longtime fans are posting videos urging/recommending new listeners to check out the rest of Jackson’s discography. (And yes, she’s getting fan edits.)
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