Frequent readers of my articles know that I absolutely love music of almost every genre, but none more than dance/techno/EDM, etc. It wasn’t too long ago that I reviewed the song Una Paloma Blanca, by George Baker Selection, 1976 song that has come back to life thanks to a still-running TikTok trend.
But now there is a new TikTok trend and it is so energetic that it simply cannot be ignored, regardless of what style of music you prefer. I give you Octopus 100.000 Hände, by Austrian group Mountain Crew. The current trend uses a 2025 version of the original that was released five years ago. Video after video, you can see the call-and-response song being enjoyed by people all over the world.
The lyrics state that, essentially, the octopus has 100,000 hands as do various other people and animals they mention. Clearly, the lyrics are essentially jibberish, but maybe that’s something that’s literally lost in translation. No matter, however, as the music more than makes up for that.
Mountain Crew is known for their folk-rock and dance music vibe and now they’re not just popular in Austria, where the official language is German. Thanks to TikTok, the whole world knows about things that have 100,000 hands. Based on those TikTok videos, it is quite apparent that the track is highly regarded in Germany.
Maybe the reason that an Austrian song is so popular in Germany is because Austrian, German and Dutch music share the same basic sound, at least to me. I know this because through my grandmother as a child, I unknowingly listened to music from these countries. Maybe that’s why this song is so catchy to me. It reminds me of the music that I was exposed to in her home.
This song is just so energetic and inoffensive that you can play it pretty much anywhere. I have a contact at a local radio station and I sent that person this song. If the station adds this song to their playlist, that would be awesome. I don’t think that the fact that the lyrics are Austrian will prevent that from happening.
If anyone thinks that an American radio station would shun a foreign-language song, I would ask that person to just look at the song Gangnam Style. That entire song is almost entirely sung in Korean with “style” being the only English word. That song blew up all over the world, even here in the United States despite not being performed entirely in English. With that in mind, I am confident that this song will wind up on US radio, if it hasn’t already. I’m sure that it’s doing very well on SiriusXM.
If anything, people might play this song over and over and they may find themselves singing it in German because they’ll unknowingly be learning the lyrics, if only phonetically. And that, dear reader, is the hallmark of a highly successful song such as this!