Shooting Stars

About

Shooting Stars is a song by Australian electronic duo Bag Raiders first released in 2008, then again in 2009 as a single. Several years after its release, the song began appearing in remix videos employing a synthwave aesthetic, particularly of people falling.

Origin

“Shooting Stars” was originally released as the B-side to Bag Raiders’ “Turbo Love” EP in 2008,^[2] and made its first appearance on YouTube on October 1st, 2008 when an instrumental version was played in a game of Audiosurf (shown below).

Bag Raiders released “Shooting Stars” in as a single in 2009, which would later be put on their self-titled album in 2010. The song peaked at number 62 on the ARIA singles chart. On July 22nd, 2009, Modular People uploaded the song’s video to YouTube. The video, shown below, is heavily influenced by retro synthwave aesthetics. It has over 13 million views.

After the song was used by Australia’s Got Talent in 2013, the song shot into the Top 40.^[1]

Spread

The first known use of the track in a meme context was of a crude animation uploaded to YouTube by Glaceygirl on December 29th, 2015 (shown below).

The track appeared in some less popular YouTube mixes until July of 2016, when it began gaining more traction. On July 30th, 2016, the track was paired with a video of CGI gorillas dancing as a parody tribute to Harambe and uploaded to YouTube by TheN00bNinja. It has gained over 150,000 views as of February 2017 (shown below).

After that, the song grew more established as a meme, appearing in several popular remixes before spiking in popularity in late January 2017 following an upload by All Ski Casino on the 23rd that paired the song with a video of a fat man diving (shown below). That video gained over 530,000 views and gained over 1,600 upvoted on /r/videos^[3] the same day.

This started a trend of videos where the song is paired with footage of people falling edited to look as though they are falling through space.

Bag Raiders’ Response

On February 14th, 2017, Pedestrian.tv^[4] interviewed Bag Raiders on the spread of the meme. The duo said they found the meme amusing, though are unsure what caused the sudden meme-spread of their song. They also described being “chuffed” that the meme exposed the song to so many people who would have otherwise never heard it. Some of the favorites they mentioned include a video that pairs the song with Lady Gaga’s Halftime Show.