Sometimes a song comes back into your life and means something completely different the second time around. For Liz – now making music as Revenge Wife – that song is a song from 2018 titled “Bathroom Bitch”, the HOLYCHILD track that has somehow taken on a massive second life online. As mentioned by Revenge Wife in her mailing list, the song has racked up more than 550 million plays on TikTok, and the song has travelled well beyond its original release.
There’s something fitting about the song resurfacing right now, as Revenge Wife wrote its melodies and lyrics and sang on the original, but its unexpected success has also changed the way she thinks about making music. Rather than treating hundreds of millions of TikTok plays as proof that artists should spend their lives chasing the next viral moment, she’s taken almost the opposite lesson from it.
“I am so proud that this song that I wrote all the melodies and lyrics to (and sing!! with my other band HOLYCHILD) has surpassed 550 million plays on tiktok,” Revenge Wife says, “and I’m so proud it made me realize the “goals” the industry tells you to do (“go viral”) are futile because the industry is inherently broken, and that realization has released me from the pressure of making art with any superficial goal in mind and has allowed me to make an album that I am so proud of because it is ME writing it all and producing it all.”
The song’s success helped fund her album Alien Witch, but it also convinced her that virality, industry expectations and the endless pressure to hit some external definition of success aren’t particularly useful reasons to make art. “And the more I engage in the music industry the more I want to disconnect and Bathroom Bitch and HOLYCHILD has taught me that! and despite the insane, life-altering number of streams on tiktok,” Revenge Wife adds. “I’ve seen how little money that is (relatively) though it has been enough to entirely FUND my album so I thank you, to past me, for being bold and provocative and writing these lyrics.”
For this remix, 6arelyhuman is a pretty perfect choice, as the remix pushes the song toward the kind of delirious late-night club moment where subtlety has already left the building: everyone knows the words, the chorus arrives, and suddenly the entire room is jumping.
