If you ask nine different people about their experience with getting their wisdom teeth out, you’ll get nine different answers. Some will smile and say they were totally normal outside of a bit of drowsiness (like the filthy liars they are), some will wax giggly poetic about the nonsense that came out of their mouth, and others will launch into a deeply uncomfortable story about how they almost died (guilty as charged).
Evidently, the advent of social media and Chappell Roan has the potential to alter the landscape of wisdom teeth stories forever, and TikTok‘s @poopsound recently outed themselves as patient zero of this new, profoundly emotional enterprise.
In the 30-second clip above, our protagonist — having just braved the rite of passage that is getting drugged up before having your wisdom teeth ripped out — can be seen half-consciously droning along to Chappell Roan’s “Casual”, which featured on the singer’s smash hit record, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. Naturally, the medicinal concoction left the TikToker sobbing profusely as the beauty of the artist’s material strikes a chord unearthed by the anesthesia.
When asked if he wanted the song to stop playing, he refuses, insisting that it’s his love for this song that’s causing all of these tears. There is, of course, a relationship between love and pain, but it’s a truly idiosyncratic act to access new levels of love on account of a mouth that’s in not-insignificant pain right now.
Chappell Roan herself stumbled upon the TikTok and promptly added it to her collection of reposts, prompting our protagonist to post a follow-up video where he sings along to her music without the performance-diminishing drugs in his system. Singing videos, you see, are what @poopsound usually posts, and while he’s got some talented vocal chops, there’s something about the unmitigated (and yet, exorbitantly mitigated) emotion in his wisdom teeth video that you can’t help but miss.
And unfortunately, that was a performance that encapsulated “lightning in a bottle” in every sense of the word. According to Healthline, regaining your thinking ability after going through a wisdom teeth removal procedure usually takes only a matter of days, and unless something goes very, very wrong, you only have the procedure once in your life. That doesn’t look to be the case for our protagonist, so even if his friends and family had the foresight to organize a concert during the timeframe of his recovery, we only ever would have seen a couple of hours of this performance at best.
Luckily, the footage we did get is logged safely in the Chappell Roan TikTok codex, so the world’s soggiest rendition of “Casual” will remain supremely accessible for both witting and unwitting beholders for the time being. That, dear readers, just might be one of the internet’s biggest victories of the year, and it marks an even bigger victory for a fandom which some thought had lost the love of its star. We salute you, @poopsound