this viral guitar riff is destroying my brain
A popular type of prompt online is asking people to brag about artists they saw before they got huge. People will gush about seeing Tame Impala as an opening act, or Wilco back at Maxwells, or [big indie artist] in a basement, or [not as big indie artist] at a house show attended by four people. "I was there," the rallying cry of LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge," is an eternal conversational impulse for music fans—having Been There signifies commitment and passion and authenticity, which are the bread, butter and jam of music fans worldwide.
The 2026 version of that, now that so much of life happens on phone, is seeing someone's audience rapidly expand because of virality. That's what's been happening this past spring to Kabir Kumar, a musician with whom I've been conversing about music and life in various forms for almost almost three years—they wrote a guitar riff, posted it on Reels with an intriguing and provocative on-screen caption, and now 174,000 people have liked it. Their IG following has sextupled, and The Riff is something that a lot of people know about, and that means that a lot of people might end up listening to Kabir's music.
on the right, a photo I took of Kabir at a Permanent Records Roadhouse show
I watched this happen and my internet-fried data processing music critic clout brain immediately went: yassss, I knew Kabir before all these people figured out his music was good!! I Enjoy Music is a blog about enjoying music, that tries to capture the simplicity and purity and honesty of enjoying music, but swirling beneath such a lofty and noble mission statement is a morass of the nastier stuff that animates the "music business" and those who participate in it: money, analytics, "buzz," "discovering" new artists before others, creating discourse, reacting to discourse, reacting to reactions to discourse, petty gossip, crass trendspotting, The Attention Economy. Perhaps all that stuff is not swirling so far beneath the mission statement; maybe you can tell it's there even when I try to hide it.
So when Kabir (who records as Sun Kin, but is also in the bands Guppy and Left Tracks, and also produces and teaches music in Los Angeles) reached out and asked if I wanted to talk about their recent experience with musical virality, I was keen to do it.
We met up at House of Pies, one of my favorite casual restaurants in L.A. It is a place that seems to actively resist virality—the lighting is bright and aggressive, the food "pretty good," the service, sparse but adequate—so it was the perfect location to discuss the fickle nature of the algorithm, the removal of context for music that gets popular on social media, and the dual sensations of excitement and anxiety that sprout from viral moments. Below, our conversation recorded and textually recreated, with some light editorializing from me...
KABIR: So Instagram was the first (and kind of the only) place where I've gone super, super viral. Both the things that I went viral for are things that I started doing a few months ago, after many years of being on social media and proclaiming many times that I didn't care. Specifically my first Substack was, "You don't have to go viral." And I would say that I'm nothing if not hypocritical and full of contradiction, which I think proves my mettle an artist.
Kabir Kumar (Sun Kin)
KABIR: But yeah, the first thing that happened was that I saw people doing chord videos. On TikTok, you can film four to six versions of yourself and harmonize with yourself. And I was like, I can do that. And so I started doing that. TikTok never really cared, but I started to cross-post to Instagram Reels, specifically on the "trial reel," where it doesn't go to your followers, it goes to randos.
MOLLY: You don't gotta pay for anything like that?
KABIR: No—but I do think that [Meta] likes it. They're like, you're not going to get to your followers anyway. Why don't you try and see if your content is good enough to keep people watching over and over again? Then it shouldn't matter that we don't show you to any of the people that are your followers! So that really helped.
[Our sandwiches arrive. I ordered a BLT, and Kabir got a club sandwich with a side of ranch.]
KABIR: I feel like the trial reel was a huge part of what happened. I was doing the chords for a while. And I did a video where I'm singing a random cluster chord, where I was like, what's the most, like, biblical angel-sounding chord that I can make with six of myself?
KABIR: And that really went off. That one has seven million views or something.
MOLLY: That's so wild. How has your followership increased with this virality?
KABIR: I had a little bit under two thousand followers, and now I have 13,500.
[As of publication, Kabir has 15,300 followers.]
MOLLY: I'm so thrilled to be in there first. I'm going to be one of those annoying people who brags about this.
KABIR: Simultaneously I've been doing these annoying—I mean, they're all annoying, because you've got to do some sort of clickbait shit to get anyone to care about anything on social media—these "what's the time signature on this one?" videos. I think I was eerily verdant with creativity, because I had just had a breakup of five years. That breakup creativity's been going up and down quite a bit. So yeah, I was posting these riffs. Left Tracks had a writing retreat in the middle of February and we went to Joshua Tree, and I brought a few songs, and one of them had The Riff. We fleshed out the songs, and we're going to record them in April, which is now kind of a meme. So I kept playing that riff, and messing with the caption until I found one that really went off:
KABIR: From an Indian point of view, a lot of the Hindustani classical music that I listened to growing up had lots of different time signature shifts. Combinations of twos and threes, naturally following a melodic thing. Tabla notation as well. And yeah, that one went the fuck off. I think that has 3.5 million views. That was the one that SZA and Willow Smith and a few other big names liked.
MOLLY: With celebrities, do you get a special ping when a big name likes your video?
KABIR: There's a priority [label]. I do think being verified is a big part of it. The larger the person is, the longer they stay up on your priority thing.
MOLLY: I saw people getting pedantic in the comments. And I feel like, especially the more specific and certain a caption is, people are going to want to quibble with it. My theory of the internet is that everyone has an opinion and everyone online wants to be heard and noticed. And so the best way to get noticed is to be annoying about responding. Does that kind of pedantic response bother you? Did you craft the post to bring those people out?
KABIR: I didn't craft it to do that. But certainly that's what happened. I've used other phrases or hooks that are less inflammatory, and they did get less engagement. But that riff, whenever I play it, it has an algorithmic magnetic pull...but to answer your question about the the pedants: I don't care if someone's like, oh, this is wrong for this reason. I think I do mind when someone is mean for no reason. Sometimes I comment back, sometimes I block, sometimes I don't respond at all. Each has its own benefits and cons. If you respond and say, "You're being mean," which I did on one occasion, then people are ready to be more mean. All of this is great for engagement. And I especially love when people argue in the comments with each other, because then I don't have to do anything.
MOLLY: Do you feel like you have a healthy relationship with the internet?
KABIR: No.
MOLLY: I was actually expecting you to say yes.
KABIR: Really?
MOLLY: Yeah. From my perspective, I read your Substack, I see your posts. It seems like you're being very creative outside of social media and that not everything in your life is filtered through social media. And you're also funny, which I feel like is maybe a sign of having—
KABIR: — mental health issues?
MOLLY: [laughing] No! More like, being able to create like a healthy distance, being able to laugh things off. That's what I'm seeing.
KABIR: That's great. So glad that I'm telegraphing that. I think I'm lucky, in that I do know that I have a lot going for me in real life. I'm in a bunch of bands, I have a bunch of communities, all of that stuff is really important and I invest in it a lot. And I feel best when I'm doing that stuff. But [social media] is a product made specifically to addict you. And I'm certainly addicted. I think Chappell Roan said this, that being successful on social media means you're destroying your brain. And since I went viral? My brain is way worse. Way worse. At first I was just being blasted. The dopamine is insane, and people should not be...um...seeing so many people. We shouldn't even know that that many people exist.
MOLLY: I totally agree. We weren't meant to sustain this number of people's perspectives or opinions. Great artists and thinkers, sure. But, like...just some some guy? No.
KABIR: Each time the really viral videos would die down, there would be an intense comedown. Where the hell is my red juice? Where the hell's my fucking dopamine? And I need to point out, I don't have push notifications on any app...but that means I just sit on the app and refresh. While it was happening and I looked right at it, it felt painful. It felt like, shit, I have to maintain this. Now I have everything to lose. Which is what they want you to feel. When I look away from it, it actually feels nice. There was a relief in feeling like, oh, the thing that I'm supposed to do, which all the labels want me to do, which everyone now considers the hallmark of success, is happening in the background. It's like looking directly at the sun versus letting the sun warm your face. The second I look at it, it becomes this horrifying, blinding force, with a gravity that's beyond anything that we are supposed to experience.
And the things that I think are cool about my art are not necessarily the things that the internet or the specifically the Meta algorithm thinks are cool about my art. I have two to three albums that I'm working on. One of which is finished, which I'll send you. It's the one that I did with my dad [ed. note: Kabir will soon release a Sun Kin album called Bobby's Voice, which is an intergenerational collaboration with his father, Rajesh Prakash Kumar]. Very little of that is being promoted by the viral videos, because they're not in the time signature world. They're more like...straight-up songs. As I've gotten better at writing songs, it's harder to show them in a Reel length, because they flow into each other, and there's a length, and there's a lack of repetition, or repetition that's disguised. Like, The Riff is not the main part of the song.
MOLLY: Okay. I was going to ask you...what is The Riff?
KABIR: So it's in a song called either "Popcorn Lung" or "Sharing Sickness," which is about how me and my ex almost competed sometimes for who felt sicker. I wrote it on the day that I went no contact with my ex. The Riff comes directly out of that. It's sort of a bittersweet swirl. It's almost a montage of the sad and also blissfully happy version of the relationship that you get, right at the end. I like it because the melody of the riff and all the time stuff, all the rhythm stuff, is paying off things that happened earlier in the song which are more subtle—The Riff is the least subtle, most climactic moment. And I have this fear of disappointing people...because the song is not The Riff. I just have to keep being like, if I change the song, I will have lost. If I disconnected The Riff from the song, it would just be such a betrayal of my own development as an artist. I think some people might think, you just needed to shoehorn The Riff into something. But I need to make it very clear that The Riff is because of the song, and not vice versa.
[Kabir asks me if I know Hudson Freeman. I say I do, because I got tipped off about his viral song "If You Know Me" via Nick Sylvester's smartdumb newsletter. Hudson went to a Guppy show at Baby's All Right. I saw Guppy play Baby's All Right, but not the same show Hudson saw.]
KABIR: Hudson has been grinding on social media for a long time. When his song went viral, I was like, whoa, that's cool that he's just playing his song. He found the right hook, and then the algorithm realized that people liked it. If you need the secret for going viral, you find the right hook and then people will like it! And then you keep posting the song. He was telling me that he would just post it a lot. I was inspired by that. I had not been posting myself playing very much, so it was sort of a nice relief to just be playing.
MOLLY: Do you know how many times you posted the riff?
KABIR: Probably ten...fifteen, maybe? If you go further back, you can see me writing The Riff. Over the course of December and January, I'm still formulating it. And then February, I know what it is and know the time signature and stuff.
MOLLY: These people who are finding these videos, would you say that they are primed to be a fan of your work in general? Are they fans of music? Are we getting to a subset of audience that could, if I dare use the marketing term, "convert"?
KABIR: Yeah. Which is good. I feel like my music does appeal to people who like music. And not people who don't like music, which—there is music that appeals to people who don't like music!
MOLLY: Oh yeah.
KABIR: But yeah, I think that has been my favorite part of it. Even if people discover me through The Riff, I'll have people following me for other reasons too, because of the light that is refracted onto everything else on my profile. Which is why I post other things a lot, because I really want it to be clear that I'm not just The Riff, and pave the way for people to listen to my other stuff. I feel that this year for me is all about taking the dub. I'm a person who's very neurotic and I'm very willing to take the L whenever possible. If there's an option between the L and the dub, I will often take the L.
MOLLY: [laughing loudly] Oh, my God.
KABIR: It's more interesting that way. But in this case, I think taking the dub of: there are people who consistently like my stuff. More people watch my story, which is cool because I feel like on my story, I post a lot of music by my friends. People are going to check things out in a way that they weren't before. It's validating.
[Our sandwiches are nearly finished. My BLT was great. We start thinking about a dessert of pie, given we're at House of Pies. I counsel against the key lime—generally my favorite flavor of pie, but the one at House of Pies is kind of weird—and we cross-reference the internet's opinions before settling on strawberry cheesecake. Not a pie, but cheesecake is basically pie, as far as I am concerned.]
KABIR: I posted a meme the other day, from the Michael Scott Paper Company episode of The Office:
KABIR: I have no shortage of chords and melodies. That's the most important part of this. Maybe due to narcissistic delusion, or just from doing this a long time, I do really strongly believe in myself. And it makes me feel I have to do this on my terms. The Riff is not necessarily all I'm about. And The Riff is also so contextless, which is not something I agree with about social media. So I feel some responsibility to steward this song.
MOLLY: I saw another meme that you posted, I'm paraphrasing, but it was like "if you do whatever you want to do instead of trying to do what everyone wants you to do, you'll be rewarded for it anyway."
KABIR: It was a picture of Alysa Liu with a tweet on top:
KABIR: And I do really agree with that. I just feel that being an artist is about accumulating mistakes rather than things you did right.
MOLLY: Oooh.
KABIR: And I think people respond to that. Even if the algorithm doesn't like you, you have to trick the algorithm to get people to respond. I've gotten these certain people. And then tomorrow I'll come up with the next stupid ass hook and I'll get more people, and if anyone's actually on board, they'll go listen to my music, they'll go see what I'm doing live and they'll be like, oh, this is like an actual person that actually plays music, has a community, is part of scenes, crafts albums, tells stories, all these things that I feel are very important for my artistry. You get them in under false pretenses, and then you're like, you know what? Here's a bunch of cake. Here's a bunch of high quality cake. And also some kale salad so you don't die.
The cheesecake arrives, a white triangular prism adorned with a crown of strawberries draped in a red gelatinous goo. It's incredible. We talk about the launch plans for the song; Kabir and Phil Di Leo, the other half of Left Tracks, are recording in April, and Kabir feels pressure to put the song out as soon as possible. It'll likely be out at the end of April, or maybe May. The content strategy for the release will be tricky—apparently, videos featuring recorded songs simply don't do as well as videos featuring casual performing. It feels apt that a fully realized work doesn't have the same juice as something that feels off-the-cuff. You don't get rewarded for that kind of artistry on this kind of internet.
It's wild that a single riff—a really cool riff, complex but so soothing—took off like this, when I know that Kabir is always doing a zillion different music things in a wide range of styles. There's the occasional single for their medieval dance pop group, Small Jesters. There's Bobby's Voice, a project where Kabir has set his father's poems about his late brother (Kabir's uncle) Bobby to music; there's also a stage play in the works that will feature those songs. The Riff is one teeny weeny part of an eclectic body of work, but it's what happened to strike gold in the fickle black box of the algorithm. And internet attention is a dangerous thing for anyone to have, but maybe being aware of its danger lets one wield its dark magic without to succumbing to total dopamine mind melt. When I saw that Kabir's videos were popping off on IG, after my lizard clout brain had stopped hissing and flapping its tongue, all I could think was: yes!! How lucky for everyone to get to tap in to Kabir's music! There's so much to enjoy.
You can, and should, follow Sun Kin on Instagram, where you will learn (if Meta doesn't hide it) about future projects like Bobby's Voice and whatever else they cook up on there.
Thanks for reading I Enjoy Music! If you like it, tell a friend. Let's make this post go viral...jk...unless...
