TikTok is being conquered by a German tongue twister. “Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar” gets hundreds of thousands dancing.
As the “New York Post” reports, among others, a German tongue twister called “Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar” is conquering international social media platforms. The lyrics were written by the musician and comedian Bodo Wartke and the YouTuber Marti Fischer. They turned the tongue twister into a rap song that went viral worldwide.
The original video of Wartke and Fischer rapping was posted in December and received over 34.4 million views on TikTok. An additional 3.5 million views were added via YouTube. This laid the foundation for the hype.
When the TikTok influencers @steph_who___ and @Christina Stasii created a dance to go with the song, nothing could stop the rapped tongue twister’s triumph. The dancers described the video with the sentence: “You have a song that you can’t even understand in your head 24/7.” The German tone and the matching dance were imitated thousands of times. It’s hard to miss the song on the platform.
In total, almost 50,000 videos with the tongue twister were uploaded to TikTok in mid-May. Wartke and Fischer have also already published videos of the dance. In a more recent video, the music comedians report that they are overwhelmed by the success.
Both wear T-shirts with a rhubarb cake print, which Fischer sells through his online shop. And they show the production of a second part. Because they didn’t put the entire tongue twister to music in their viral hit.
If the text sounds familiar, you’ll remember a hit on YouTube Germany that was also absolutely viral for the time. The video “Rhabarberbarbara” was uploaded in 2013 and has now been viewed almost 9.4 million times. Without dancing, but with images that, according to the video description, were created with Microsoft Paint, its popularity remains limited to the German-speaking world.
The international attention for the well-known tongue twister is good for Germany, said “Stern” columnist David Baum in an opinion piece. The song would counteract the cliché that Germans have no sense of humor.
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