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The vocal track changes every 15 seconds or so during a Big Bootie mix, though the instrumental backing track sometimes continues for a couple minutes. I had to play Volume 18 on my walk back to work.” For me, it was unnatural hearing the song continue without transitioning into ‘UCLA’ by RL Grime. Just this morning, I was in Starbucks getting breakfast and ‘Lose Somebody’ by Kygo and OneRepublic was playing. Instead of focusing on the white-hot fire burning through my muscles, I’m having a blast singing along (sometimes actually out loud) and looking forward to my favorite parts. It’s a really interesting phenomenon because you can never hear the individual songs from a mix the same way. Search “big bootie working out” on Twitter, and you’ll find a bevy of accounts proclaiming they can’t remember what exercise even was before they discovered Two Friends.
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The videos get their fair share of looks - Volume 20 dropped a little over a month ago and already has half a million views - but it’s the euphoric, distractive chaos of the audio iterations that has people coming back for more, especially when they’re ready to put in up to 60 minutes of training. If that sounds like a sensory overload, that’s kind of the entire point. When two songs are playing at once, the feed will cut back and forth from video to video accordingly. YouTube is also a popular medium, because Two Friends splice music video clips from every single song that made a volume’s playlist.
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The hour-long mixes have registered at least five million streams per release for years now (the most popular mashups are pushing 20 million), and that doesn’t account for alternative listening platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcasts. But it’s become overtly clear that exercising to the mashups is actually a niche national pastime - and if you’re stuck in an exercise funk, they could be just the thing you need to start turning in stellar sessions again.īut they’re best known for their Big Bootie mixes, which don’t necessarily put up “monster” streaming numbers, by Soundcloud’s standards, yet have attracted a consistent cult following. At first, being so late to the Big Bootie universe, I wondered if I was one of the select few who’d rather run sprints than take shots to the mixes. I won’t tee them up for every single run, cycle or lift, but on days where I’m looking to put in a tough track workout or summon some extra energy in the gym, I know where to turn. I’ve worked out to Big Bootie mixes consistently for about 10 months now. And yet I’d apparently covered a a lot of sand. I felt like I’d emerged from a daydream flow state. I’d barely registered the last 40 minutes. By the end of my workout, I was drenched in sweat, hangover-free and somewhat disoriented, though in an oddly satisfying way. I ended up running six miles at my usual three-mile pace. I selected one at random (Volume 15) and set out for a three-mile run down by the beach. The next day, in an attempt to sweat out all the damage that my late-night Big Bootie’ing had caused, I repurposed the discovery for some exercise, just as the partygoer had recommended. Sometime around 2 a.m., a kinder peer took pity on me and offered a quick debrief: “These are perfect whenever you need a boost. I looked around the room in disbelief each time the mix cut on a dime and debuted a new, familiar melody - You guys hearin’ this?! - until I finally realized that this wasn’t new territory for anyone else in the room. It proceeded from there, banger after banger, sometimes layered atop one another. John Martin, “Don’t Start Now” by Dua Lipa and “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls. The mashup’s first three snippets: “Don’t You Worry Child (Instrumental)” by Swedish House Mafia ft. At one point, someone managed to pull up Soundcloud on the big screen, and pressed play on “Big Bootie Mix Vol. My sole link to the party - a buddy who had gone to bed - was firmly out of the picture, so I was soldiering on into the night with a roster of randos (or at least a roster of familiars to whom I was a rando).
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The first time I listened to a Big Bootie mix was at a postgame in Santa Monica.