A Minecraft parody of Taio Cruz’s ‘Dynamite’ has passed the original on YouTube

You remember Taio Cruz’s club banger ‘Dynamite’. Contemporaneous with Ke$ha’s ‘TiK ToK’ [sic], Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ [sic], and Akon’s Sexy Chick (sick), it was a typical carefree earworm that signified nothing, but successfully distracted week-trippers to Magaluf in the summer of 2010. And in a sign of the changing times, the view count on its garment-phobic YouTube video has been surpassed by a Minecraft parody entitled ‘TNT’.

As far as we can tell, TNT is about blowing things up so as to mine resources with which to build an ambitious city. On this musical journey the building part gets forgotten as creator CaptainSparklez is consumed by bloodlust. First he gets distracted by killing pigs, then the Creeper (“teabag his ghost and now his sulfur’s mine, singing aaay-oh, MLG pro”), and then by blowing up “every mountain, every valley” and “everything you’ve ever known.” It’s a relentlessly upbeat slide into insanity.

As good a dance tune as Dynamite is, you wouldn’t argue that it’s lyrically rich. Taio Cruz takes four minutes and sixteen seconds to say exactly nothing apart from where he puts his hands and how happy he is to be “wearing all [his] favourite brands, brands, brands”, so for a YouTube audience, I can kinda see why TNT eventually overtook him.

As spotted by newbie1canoebee on Reddit, TNT has a muscular 102,495,151 views at time of writing, having left Dynamite languishing on 85,752,075. TNT was released several months later on February 26, 2011, while Dynamite came out on July 16, 2010.

Here’s Dynamite, if you fancy a dose of nostalgia and mindless optimism – and hey, you’ll get no judgement from me. Summer 2010 was awesome.

In recent Minecraft news, there’s a mod that puts ray tracing into the game and it looks incredible, while Microsoft appears to have removed references to the game’s original creator, Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, in its latest update (though Notch still appears in the credits, which is probably the most important place).