Bing Bong TikTok trend explained: NYC subway jingle goes viral

If you’ve been to New York City, you’ll know the “Bing Bong” noise of the NYC Subway doors. That exact sound is going viral on TikTok thanks to Instagram stars “Sidetalk”, whose one-minute videos are providing hilarious audio for people to act out to.

TikTok has been overrun with one two-note sound over the last month, a simple “Bing Bong”. It’s just a bell — familiar to New Yorkers from their subway system — but now it’s all over the platform.

Why? Well, it’s thanks to “Sidetalk“, a NYC street show created by Jack Byrne and Trent Simonian. While they have dozens of different one-minute clips of the city that never sleeps, they are all unified by the same “Bing Bong” jingle at the start.

It’s now inescapable on TikTok, with the “Bing Bong” trend going viral on the platform. Here’s why you’re hearing it, and why the NYC subway jingle has gone global.

Bing Bong TikTok trend original video

There’s not just one original video for the Bing Bong TikTok trend, although there’s a collection of them floating around the platform — all from various Sidetalk snippets.

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The most popular of them all is the “Joe Byron” clip from Sidetalk’s “Coney Island Ski Club” video. The 55-second upload has more than 5 million views on YouTube — making it their most popular video by far.

It’s been used on TikTok thanks to a clip from ‘yvngwxrld‘, with over 95,000 videos using the “original sound” at the time of publishing.

There’s also a selection of clips people can use for audio on Sidetalk’s TikTok directly.

“Joe Byron” (Joe Biden) gets involved in Bing Bong TikTok trend

Everyone is jumping on board the Bing Bong trend, from small content creators to famous celebrities — and even the man himself Joe Byron (aka the President of the United States, Joe Biden).

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Biden did a TikTok with the Jonas Brothers, with their own mashup on the audio tweaking the start before getting to the iconic “take me out for dinner” line.

Lil Nas X also did the rounds at some of the end-of-year shows, getting a host of mainstream celebrities to lip-sync the iconic audio.

 

For Sidetalk, their videos going viral on TikTok has boosted their social reach massively. They’ve gone from a few hundred thousand TikTok followers to over 3.5 million in less than a month, and they’ve experienced a similar boom on YouTube and Instagram.

Keep an eye out for more of their iconic NYC snippets on TikTok — because if you hear that “Bing Bong”, you know exactly where it’s from.