Ever wanted to enjoy the sensation of being in the bathroom at a crowded house party from the comfort of your own home? Check out “but you’re in the bathroom at a party” edits.
In the bathroom at a party edits are versions of songs that sounds muffled and far away to replicate the way loud music sounds when you’re a couple rooms over.
You can look up any popular song with “in the bathroom at a party” on YouTube and find the mellowed out version. Take “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles as an example, the YouTube results yield “Harry Styles watermelon sugar but you’re making out in the bathroom at a party,” “Harry Styles Watermelon Sugar but you are in a bathroom at a party,” and “harry styles – watermelon sugar (bathroom party).” Each video features a stylized bathroom as the thumbnail.
What does a memory sound like? TikTok remembers.
These videos allow you to occupy the sacred space that is the secluded bathroom at a party: your friends are all a couple of rooms over, you can hear the music bumping, but for a moment you’re alone. Like the bathroom does at a party, these edits provide you with a breather from the chaos of life. The edits allow you to listen to your favorite club songs but with a more chilled out feeling. Even the most upbeat, overwhelming songs become the perfect background noise to listen to while studying, working, relaxing, or sleeping. They are the edgy cousin to low-fi beats to chill out and study to.
Lennon Mitchell, the 20 year-old behind the popular YouTube channel “pain hours,” tells Mashable that it takes 10 to 30 minutes to make an edit depending on the video length. “To achieve the sound you cut out the high end frequencies of the song and put in a lot of reverb,” said Mitchell.
It’s not just the sound of the edits that creates a specific ambience. The artwork for these edits is all the same: an image of a generic empty bathroom bathed in bright colored monochromatic light. When you put on one of these videos the empty bathroom welcomes you into a liminal space.
What began as a meme is now a mainstay of the internet. In 2017 an edit of Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” titled, “What Redbone would sound like while you’re making out in the bathroom of a house party” went viral on Twitter. It quickly became a popular meme with each subsequent edits more bizarre than the last like, “What Redbone would sound like if it was played in a manhole“ and “What Redbone would sound like if it was sung by Carl Wheezer.“
By 2018, very specific edits of songs were no longer a joke, but a beloved niche corner of the internet. Edits like “Tyler the Creator – Boredom but its Played on a 1988 Sony Boombox on a Rainy Day“ and “mr. brightside from another room“ found an audience of lonely, pensive people. The comments of these videos are filled with remarks like, “Never knew I would come across a video this specific that’s such a necessity to my life wow,” and “This makes me feel oddly left out and nostalgic? Memories of crying at school dances and sitting alone in the bathroom.”
But the most popular of the specific edit of songs trend is in the bathroom at a party edits. They thrived on the internet for years and unsurprisingly gained popularity during the period of time when we all longed to be at a crowded party: quarantine.
Mitchell’s videos typically feature a handful of popular songs from a given year. In a time when nostalgia became a main cultural force these videos thrived. Not only could you imagine you were at a crowded party, but you could transport yourself to the year of the before times of your choosing with popular songs from that era. The most popular video on Mitchell’s channel is “you’re in the bathroom at a 2013 party“ which has 3.8 million views.
There’s “even what 2020 parties would have sounded like and you were in a bathroom.” Here people got to experience the year they missed out on by listening to 2020 chart toppers like “Mood” and “Dynamite.” The comments read, “Lets pretend the pandemic didn’t exist” and “this made me nostalgic for the parties we could never have.”
“I love listening to these edits because they give me a feeling I can’t describe,” explained Mitchell. “Millions of people can relate to that nostalgia.”
