Miki Matsubara's "Stay With Me"

Submission 9,518

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About

"Mayonaka no Door (Stay With Me)" is a 1979 city pop song by Japanese singer Miki Matsubara. A commercially successful hit at the time of its release, the song experienced a resurgence in popularity in late 2020, spawning a TikTok trend, achieving number one position on Spotify's Viral 50 Chart and being used in various memes throughout 2021.

Origin

On November 5th, 1979, Japanese singer Miki Matsubara released her debut single "Mayonaka no Door" (jap. 真夜中のドア).^[1] The city pop song peaked at 28th on the Oricon Singles Chart and is widely considered Matsuraba's greatest work (music video and live concert performance shown below, left and right).

[This video has been removed]

Stay with me
Mayonaka no doa o tataki
Kaeranaide to naita (Ooh)
Ano kisetsu ga ima me no mae

Stay with me
Knocking on midnight's door
Begging you not to go home (Ooh)
That season when I cried right in front of your eyes

Spread

On August 13th, 2018, and April 11th, 2019, YouTubers^[2]^[3] BokChoiTV and Potato Gloomer uploaded a music video and concert performance of the song to YouTube, where they accumulated over 9.4 million and 1.6 million views in three years and two years, respectively. On April 14th, 2020, the automatically generated YouTube^[4] channel Miki Matsubara – Topic uploaded music audio of the song, with the video gaining over 42.2 million views in one year.

Prior to its use in memes, the song had been a popular choice for covers. On February 19th, 2019, YouTuber^[5] Fujii Kaze uploaded a cover version that received over 910,000 views in two years (shown below, left). A cover by music duo Darlim & Hamabal, uploaded to YouTube^[6] on January 16th, 2020, received over 1.1 million views in one year (shown below, right).

The song did not see a presence in memes until August 25th, 2020, when iFunny^[7] user pvtsnafu posted a STFU I'm Listening to meme featuring the song (shown below, left). The post received over 570 smiles in one year (shown below). A June 13th, 2021, iFunny^[8] repost of the meme gained over 40,000 smiles in one month. On October 29th, 2020, following an increase in popularity of the song among Indonesian audiences,^[9] Indonesian YouTuber^[10] Rainych Ran posted a cover that received over 5 million views in nine months (shown below, right).

Starting in November 2020, the song gained popularity on TikTok,^[11]^[12] initially being used in miscellaneous outside of a defined format. On November 11th, 2020, TikToker^[13] @vintage.editx._ posted an edit based on a video of a live performance of the song that received over 3.5 million likes in eight months.

On December 10th, TikToker^[14] @arisa.teo posted a video in which she put on the song for her Japanese mother in order to find out if she would recognize it (shown below, left). The video received over 27.7 million views and 6.7 million likes, spawning a trend (examples^[15]^[16] shown below, center and right).

As of July 19th, 2021, over 240,000 videos using the song were posted on TikTok.^[17]

On December 13th, 2020, "Stay With Me" reached number one position on Spotify's Viral 50 chart.^[18] A number of articles exploring the song's newfound popularity were posted in December and the following months, including pieces by Billboard^[19] and Pitchfork.^[20]

In late December 2020, a number of Withered Wojak memes expressing sorrow over the early death of Miki Matsubara were circulated.^[21]^[22]

The song maintained a moderate presence in memes throughout 2021.