TikTok gave Drake another viral moment by reviving “Nonstop,” and now he really doesn’t wanna stop. This time, the rapper’s latest song, “Toosie Slide,” already had a popular dance challenge three days before it even dropped (at midnight on April 3). Always onto the next thing, the rapper actually enlisted dancer and producer Toosie — who was chilling with Ayo & Teo and Hiii Key at the time, three more dancers with massive social-media followings — to create some moves for his new dance song. Since there are no parties for his song to play at, Drake wanted to move the party online. Almost immediately after the dancers posted the moves, it caught everyone’s attention.
With their combined power across Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok, these four 20-year-olds could make any dance go viral. Ayo & Teo, a duo of brothers, have 2.9 million followers on Instagram, not to mention their 5.3 million subscribers on YouTube, where they post dance videos and music. Toosie, a dancer and producer who’s worked with Future, and Hiii Key, another double threat, have close to a million Instagram followers combined. When Drake reached out to Toosie with just a hook and a verse, it only took them 45 minutes to get back to him with a dance: a creative interpretation of Drake’s simple instructions “Left foot up, right foot slide.” “Drake said, ‘You guys are the greatest ever,’” Toosie told Rolling Stone. “This is a text message. We got receipts. Literally, he fell in love with it. It was just an idea for it. I said, ‘This is just what we came up with so far.’ He was like, ‘Bro, this is it. You don’t need to do nothing else.’”
So, on March 31, the same raw footage they sent to Drake of the four of them dancing in a line with colorful lights floating on the ceiling became the world’s introduction to the “Toosie Slide.” Snippets of the yet-unreleased song were unmistakably Drake, but later that night, the rapper confirmed that he was dropping the song — now officially called “Toosie Slide,” thanks to fans — on Thursday. The coronavirus sidetracked plans for a big music video, so Drake danced alone in his massive mansion. But across the world, more and more people are getting down to “Toosie Slide.” So far, it’s all going according to Drake’s master plan. “This kind of worked out in our favor,” Toosie added. “You have nothing else to do. You might as well do the ‘Toosie Slide’ in the house. You can’t go nowhere.”
