People on TikTok Are Showing off Their Singing Chops With This Katy Perry Song

It’s been seven years since Katy Perry released the song “Dark Horse,” but 2020 is the year that it’s gone viral on TikTok — the internet sure does work in mysterious ways! If you’ve spent a significant amount of time on the popular video-sharing app, you may have heard people try their hand at singing the “make me your Aphrodite” line from the song. As it turns out, that particular line (in addition to being, like, really great) is also at the center of something called the Dark Horse Challenge. Oooh. How mysterious!

For whatever reason, the “make me your Aphrodite” line from the song has become the ultimate test for singers on TikTok — and so many of them have not only risen to the challenge but also exceeded all of our expectations! Seriously, some of these are unbelievably good.

In “Dark Horse,” Katy Perry sings the “make me your Aphrodite” line pretty simply — there’s not a lot of embellishment going on. The same cannot be said for the people who sing the line on TikTok, however. It seems as though in the Dark Horse Challenge, more is more. You can find people embellishing the heck out of just that one line and, as we said, it’s pretty darn incredible.

The initial version of the Dark Horse Challenge simply involved people singing the “Aphrodite” line with as many runs and flourishes as they could possibly cram in, but it looks like it evolved from there. Now, there’s the Dark Horse Popcorn Duet which is even harder!

Popcorn duets have been around for a while on TikTok. They involve one creator singing one part of a song and then encouraging other people to duet them singing the other half. Usually, they include the lyrics in the video and use different colors to denote who sings which part. 

The Dark Horse popcorn duet is on a totally different level, though. The original video by @jmko_music shows him splitting the song up in such a way that requires duetting singers to have complete and total control over their voice. And, as you can see, some TikTok singers clearly do.

Because this is TikTok we’re talking about, there have also been plenty of people who have taken the Dark Horse Challenge and made joke videos of them singing the song badly (on purpose). In some cases, those are even more entertaining to watch the good singers. After all, there are plenty of good singers in the world, but it almost takes more talent to be this bad:

It’s pretty amazing that a song from 2013 has enjoyed renewed popularity on TikTok in 2020. Back when Katy Perry first recorded “Dark Horse,” TikTok wasn’t even a thing! Leave it to the internet to bring back hit songs from years past, put a new spin on them, and make them into a whole new experience for 2020. Now, we just want to know what song will be next.