The Aura Farming Song: Why Young Black & Rich Is Everywhere

Ask anyone what the aura farming song is and you get the same answer: "Young Black & Rich" by Melly Mike. The track was paired with the viral Pacu Jalur boat dance and became the default audio for the entire trend.

How a song becomes an aura sound

Aura farming edits need a very specific kind of audio. It has to be:

• Slow enough to walk to. The format is built on unhurried movement; anything frantic fights the visuals.
• Confident without being triumphant. Triumph implies the moment mattered to you, and that is a point deduction.
• Loopable in eight seconds. Short-form clips only need one bar to land.

"Young Black & Rich" hits all three, which is why it stuck to the boat kid clip and then detached from it entirely. CNA filmed Melly Mike alongside the dancer at the following year's race — the rare case of a meme song and its subject meeting in person.

The wider aura soundtrack

The trend has settled into a small pool of audio types rather than one track:

• Slowed and reverbed R&B, for walking-away edits.
• Drill and phonk, for sports clips where the under-reaction follows a big play.
• Orchestral swells, used ironically over extremely minor achievements — the joke being that the music takes it more seriously than the subject does.

Using audio without losing points

The audio is the one part of an aura farming clip where effort is allowed to show, because everyone knows it was added afterwards. Everything in front of the camera still has to look unplanned. Choreographing to the beat is where most attempts collapse into negative aura — the movement stops reading as behaviour and starts reading as a routine.

For the underlying rules, read our guide to aura farming and how aura points are awarded. For the visual half of the equation, see how to do the aura farming dance.