C.J. Baxter’s 43-Second Viral Loop: How a Kiwi Teen Accidentally Sound-Tracked the End of the World

C.J. Baxter and the Portable Apocalypse: How One Kid’s Viral Playlist Became the Soundtrack to Civilizational Anxiety
By Alistair “Grim” McTavish, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker

In the grand, slow-motion car crash we politely call “the 2020s,” it usually takes a thermonuclear tweet or a surprise land war to make the entire planet synchronize its doom-scrolling. This week, however, the choreographer of our collective panic attack is a 17-year-old from suburban Auckland who records under the moniker “C.J. Baxter.” His 43-second TikTok loop—a snippet of lo-fi banjo over a voicemail from his nan saying, “If the sea comes, save the cat, love”—has been mashed, memed, and mistranslated into 32 languages, including Klingon, where it apparently means “The empire is tired.”

From Seoul’s fluorescent subway cars to São Paulo’s favela rooftops, teens are lip-syncing the line with the solemnity once reserved for national anthems. Meanwhile, in Brussels, EU technocrats—who until yesterday believed “viral” was something you disinfected—have convened an emergency working group on “Algorithmic Sentiment Contagion.” Their PowerPoint deck, leaked to Dave’s Locker, lists “CJB-43” as a threat vector on par with deep-fake central bankers and whatever Elon is calling Twitter this month.

Baxter himself is flummoxed. When reached via Discord (voice settings: underwater troll), he admitted his only goal had been to score a free pizza from the local shop that promised “exposure coupons.” Instead, he’s now fielding calls from Netflix (scripted series), North Korea’s Moranbong Band (remix request), and a Swiss hedge fund that wants to securitize “teen fatalism futures.” The kid asked if any of them could just PayPal him twenty bucks so he could replace the cracked screen on his phone. Capitalism, ever the gracious host, offered him a sponsorship deal with a blue-light-blocking glasses startup instead.

Global implications? Oh, they’re as subtle as a brick through a stained-glass window. Japanese trend analysts note that C.J.’s track has supplanted the last shred of hope on the nation’s Spotify charts; salarymen now queue for bullet trains humming “save the cat, love” like it’s the new company hymn. In Nairobi, matatu drivers blare the remix at full volume, because nothing says “traffic jam” like existential dread with a reggaeton backbeat. And somewhere in the Arctic Circle, a Russian research vessel reports that polar bears—confused by the omnipresent bass line—have begun head-bobbing, which scientists classify as either interspecies cultural transmission or the final sign of ecological surrender.

The darker joke is that Baxter’s accidental anthem lands just as the Doomsday Clock ticked to 89.9 seconds and then quietly gave up, deciding that half-past Armageddon is close enough. Climate ministers in Dubai, fresh from agreeing to “phase down” the phrase “phase out,” queued for selfies with a cardboard cutout of the teen, hoping some of his fatalistic cool might rub off on their approval ratings. CNN ran a chyron: “CAN C.J. BAXTER FIX THE PLANET?” The answer, whispered between sips of overpriced oat-milk lattes, is obviously no—but at least he can monetize the sinking ship with a sync license.

So what does it all mean, dear reader? Simply that in 2024, the gap between a bedroom in New Zealand and the geopolitical weather vane has collapsed to the length of one ironic banjo riff. The world’s nervous system is now wireless, battery-operated, and permanently set to vibrate. Every time you hit “like,” somewhere a defense minister updates a risk matrix in Comic Sans.

C.J. Baxter will probably release a follow-up next week—something about NFT hamsters or whatever—and the planet will pivot, Pavlovian, to the next micro-apocalypse. But for now, while glaciers calve and markets convulse, teenagers from Reykjavík to Jakarta chant “save the cat, love” like a rosary for the end times. Which, when you think about it, is as close to global unity as we’re likely to get before the Wi-Fi finally dies.

Sleep tight, humanity. The cat’s in the bag, the bag’s in the river, and the river’s rising.