Roxanne, Roxanne
Image courtesy of Rolling Stone
By GRACIE DENNEEN ‘21
Whether you heard it while learning the famous TikTok dance or while listening to one of your generated playlists on Spotify, everyone’s heard the famous “Roxanne” with its ridiculously catchy melody in the past couple of months. But amidst all of the chaos, have you ever stopped to wonder where this song came from? Who’s the mastermind behind this earworm, and how did this song and artist appear seemingly from thin air?
Arizona Zervas, a rapper from a small town in Maryland, wasn’t new to the music world when he created and released the hit “Roxanne.” According to the bio on his website, Zervas began writing music in eleventh grade. He quickly gained popularity in what Variety calls the “underground music scene” after the release of his first single -- “Don’t Hit My Line” -- in 2016. Zervas also acquired viral fame that year when he created a rap strategically incorporating every NFL team into its lyrics (look it up—it’s really impressive!). According to Genius, the video went viral and racked up eight million views in just one week, helping to put Zervas’s name on the map.
Prior to Roxanne’s release, Zervas dropped thirty singles on Spotify over the course of three years, including songs with cheerful names such as “FML” and “When I Die.” Zervas earned a small but avid fanbase of around 504,000 monthly listeners (as of October 2018) through his consistent release of music over those years. According to Billboard, Zervas prides himself on his authentic approach to music. Billboard also notes that Zervas features the phrase “non-fiction” in his Instagram and Twitter bios to emphasize the fact that he writes and engineers all of his own music with minimal help from producers.
Zervas’s intimate fanbase exploded after his monumental release of “Roxanne” on October 10th, 2019. The song’s ridiculously catchy melody and upbeat tempo implanted itself into the minds of teens across the nation and launched it to the top of the charts almost immediately. According to Billboard, “Roxanne” reached #1 on Spotify’s charts on November 8th, overtaking both “Highest in the Room” by Travis Scott and “Circles” by Post Malone, songs by two of the most famous mainstream artists right now. The hit remained in the top spot for an entire week, from the 8th to the 13th of November, and earned one million streams per day during that time. Zervas impressed the world by being the first unsigned artist to top Spotify’s charts since 2017, according to Variety. As of November 30th, Zervas sports a whopping twenty million monthly listeners on Spotify, a drastic increase from his previous count of 504,000 just a year prior. He has also earned international acclaim, topping the charts in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Japan. And, to top it all off, TikTok users have danced to the song in around 320,000 videos.
Arizona Zervas has put in the work and is on track to huge successes. If Zervas can gain such incredible fame in such a short time span, what else can he do? Genius stated that “Arizona Zervas is quickly showing the world why he deserves to be next,” and, according to Rolling Stone, Columbia Records recently signed him to their label. But, we all know artists who were “one hit wonders.” Will Zervas’s hard work pay off? Or will Arizona Zervas vanish from the charts as quickly as he rose to fame?