Plutonium Jazz

Submission 9,012

About

Plutonium Jazz is a fictional genre of jazz music said to be popular in the 1940s in which bass players attempt to synchronize the beats of their instruments with the clicks of a Geiger counter. The genre was invented by TikToker @businesstechnoinstitute in mid-July 2024 when he uploaded a video to the site showcasing a fake Wikipedia page for the genre over an audio clip representing a plutonium jazz song. The video inspired further memes about the fake genre, along with some posts sharing the fake Wikipedia page as if the genre once existed. According to the meme, plutonium jazz was banned after giving radiation poisoning to those who attended the shows.

Origin

On July 18th, 2024, TikToker^[1] @businesstechnoinstitute posted a video consisting of a fake Wikipedia page for a genre of jazz purportedly popular in the 1940s during the nuclear age known as "plutonium jazz." The page describes plutonium jazz as featuring "jazz players synchronizing their beats with the rhythmic clicks of a Geiger counter," continuing, "the more accurately the beats matched the Geiger counter, the more excited the audience became." The page then explains that plutonium jazz was banned when club patrons and musicians were given radiation poisoning due to the genre's reliance on radiation. The video gained over 1.7 million views in four days (shown below).

The audio attached to the video is meant to be a representation of what plutonium jazz would sound like.

Spread

TikToker @businesstechnoinstitute continued to post videos about plutonium jazz over the following days. On July 18th, 2024, the TikToker^[2] posted a meme about the "person that says they listen to anything" listening to plutonium jazz, garnering over 300,000 views in four days (shown below, left). On July 20th, they posted another meme to TikTok^[3] about the genre, garnering over 54,000 views in two days (shown below, right).

Also on July 20th, 2024, X^[4] user @puffdragon711 reposted the original plutonium jazz Wikipedia video, writing, "I know a couple oomfs into this," garnering over 23,000 likes and 3,500 reposts in two days (shown below). On July 21st, a post was made to the subreddit /r/Damnthatsinteresting^[5] sharing the video, titled, "Quite the music genre," garnering around 114 upvotes in a day before it was removed by moderators. Most comments called the genre out for being fake.