Few songs have travelled as far on as little as “Mia Khalifa”, the 2018 track by the Atlanta duo iLOVEFRiDAY. Built on a bouncy beat, arcade sound effects and one gloriously whiny verse, it became the unofficial anthem of early TikTok, with the phrase “Hit or Miss” shouted across supermarkets and schoolyards all over the world. Yet the story behind it is far less cheerful. It is a diss track born from a fake tweet, aimed at a woman who had nothing to do with the feud. So what does the song actually mean, how did it spiral into a meme, and what does its legacy tell us about the internet?
A feud built on a joke
The duo, rapper Aqsa Malik (known as Smoke Hijabi) and producer Carrington Hyatt (Xeno Carr), had already attracted a modest online following with their 2017 song “Hate Me”. Its video showed Malik, a Pakistani-American woman, smoking while wearing a hijab, which drew plenty of attention from meme communities. By early 2018, a screenshot began circulating that appeared to show a tweet from Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese-American internet personality and former adult-film actress, criticising Malik for disrespecting Muslim women. The screenshot was a fake, a joke someone had put together. Khalifa, it should be noted, is not Muslim and never has been, having been raised in the Catholic Church in Lebanon.
Malik has said she believed the tweet was real and was shocked by what she saw as hypocrisy, given a notorious scene from Khalifa’s past in which a hijab appeared. Many of the duo’s fans apparently believed it too and demanded a response. Whether the pair ever truly realised it was a hoax is unclear; some observers have been sceptical. Either way, they answered the demand with a diss track, self-released on 12 February 2018, with a music video following on 4 March. A record that exists to win an argument that never took place is a peculiar thing, and it sets the tone for everything that followed.
What the song actually says
As a piece of writing, “Mia Khalifa” is a straightforward takedown. It is built around insults aimed at Khalifa’s past career and reputation, and framed as a comeback to an accusation she never made. Strip away the beat and you are left with a song that attacks a woman for her work in ways that many critics found ugly. A panel at Vice called it upsettingly misogynistic and suggested the duo should apologise; a student writer at KentWired found it petty. Even those who praised its unconventional catchiness tended to separate the hook from the target. The meaning, in other words, is not complicated. The complication is how the world chose to receive it.
It’s also worth noting the production choices. Xeno Carr built the track around sound effects from the arcade game Street Fighter II, including the “Fight!” announcement near the start and a triumphant “You win!” at the end. The effect is cartoonish, turning a real person into a boss to be defeated. It’s a clever bit of sonic framing, and a troubling one: it makes the whole thing sound like a game, which probably helped it spread. Pitchfork’s Duncan Cooper singled out Malik’s verse as capturing her at her absolute brattiest, and that sneering, singsong delivery is exactly what made it so easy to imitate, and so hard to forget.
How a diss track became a meme
For months, the song lingered as a modest success. Then, in autumn 2018, TikTok users started lip-syncing to Malik’s verse, whose opening line, the part that gave the song its nickname, became the internet’s favourite earworm. A high-school student in South Dakota uploaded an early clip, a British user named Georgia Twinn made a hugely popular version, and a cosplayer known as NyanNyanCosplay posted a lip-sync as the character Nico Yazawa that helped push it into the mainstream. YouTubers including PewDiePie spread it further. By February 2019, there were at least four million TikTok videos using the sound, and the song had reached number one on Spotify’s Global Viral 50.
The meme took on a life of its own in the physical world as the “#TikTokTest”, in which users wandered into shops or schools shouting the first words of the verse, hoping a stranger would finish the line. It became a kind of secret handshake. The irony is brutal: a song created to humiliate one woman became a shared in-joke for millions of people who mostly had no idea what it was about. Bhad Bhabie pointed out that plenty of listeners were young children who didn’t understand what they were repeating, and that observation lands uncomfortably close to the truth. Virality, it turns out, is very good at separating a sound from its meaning.
Its commercial afterlife was stranger still. The song was re-released by Records Co and Columbia Records in December 2018, and it later opened the duo’s second EP, Mood, in September 2019. By then, the original video had been viewed more than 50 million times, and in the first half of 2019 the song’s lyrics were among the most-read on the site Genius, ahead of tracks by Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber. A novelty record by two unsigned rappers had somehow out-read the global pop machine.
The cost of going viral
Khalifa has said she was hurt by the song and that it left her afraid of going on TikTok and being shamed. Tubefilter’s Reed Kavner made the point plainly at the time: she was an innocent bystander who had been targeted after doing nothing at all. There was a financial scandal too. Because the song spread without a licensing deal, iLOVEFRiDAY initially earned nothing from TikTok, and Pitchfork’s Cooper estimated they had made around $150,000 from YouTube views alone, a figure their manager laughed at, hinting it might even be low. The group later struck a promotional deal with the app, which prompted a wider debate about how little TikTok paid the artists who fuelled it.
Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion compared the situation to Chuck Berry getting a Cadillac instead of royalties, and the line stuck. The song also reminded the industry that a record could blow up without a label, a radio push or a marketing budget, a lesson it absorbed quickly. Some even called it a forerunner of later TikTok breakouts such as “Old Town Road”. But the precedent cuts both ways. It showed how fast the internet can turn a lie into a chart-topper, and how little anyone cares to check whether the story underneath is true.
Final thoughts
“Mia Khalifa” is, on its face, a catchy nonsense track. Look closer and it becomes a case study in how fast misinformation, misogyny and meme culture can fuse. A fake screenshot became a song, the song became a trend, and a woman who had done nothing wrong became the unwilling star of a joke she never asked to be in. It also helped show how TikTok could launch a record without a label or a radio push, a lesson the industry absorbed quickly. The song’s legacy is therefore double-edged: proof of the internet’s power to make a hit, and a warning about who ends up paying for it.