Cue the drumbeat, the one people think they know.
Boom. It lands right before Whitney Houston delivers the final chorus of the best-selling single of all time by a solo female artist, the music pausing first.
“And I,” she belts out with a vocal run, “will always love you.”
On social media, people have been attempting to recreate that unforgettable and thunderous interlude from the hit song featured in the 1992 movie “The Bodyguard” starring Ms. Houston, a cover of the 1974 ballad composed by Dolly Parton.
It is a test of reflexes.
Hollywood actors, professional athletes and ordinary people have learned just how difficult the timing of the drumbeat is, taking part in what has become known on social media as the Whitney Houston drum challenge.
The objective? Hit the drum — a pot or hand-clapping will suffice — at the same instant as in the song.
Millions have watched videos of the struggles of these amateur percussionists, who have included Scarlett Johansson, soccer players with the British Premier League team Tottenham Hotspur, U.S. Open tennis competitors, teachers and students.
There have been false starts and near misses. Everyone seems to agree on one thing: It’s harder than it looks.
“I’ve always tried to put a big moment in a song, but nothing, of course, worked as good as that one,” David Foster, who produced and arranged the song for Ms. Houston, said in an interview on Thursday.
The phenomenon is amusing to Mr. Foster, 76, who has won 16 Grammy Awards and also collaborated on hit songs with other music superstars, including Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand and Andrea Bocelli.
“I think it’s fun,” he said. “It sort of made me rethink how long the pause is.”
The song’s ending, illustrative of the octave range of Ms. Houston, who died in 2012 at age 48, has a name. Nita Whitaker, who sang the original demo for the hit single, coined it the “boom and I,” according to Mr. Foster.
At Griswold Middle School in eastern Connecticut, teachers and students, one after another, stepped up to a large drum in the gymnasium on Oct. 24 to test their mettle. The competition headlined the school’s red ribbon spirit rally, an event aimed at spreading awareness about the dangers of drugs and alcohol.
Even the school’s wolverine mascot and a police officer got into the act, the song’s dramatic chorus playing over and over as if it was on a loop as each contestant missed the mark.
Then, Erin Shea, 45, a fifth-grade math teacher, stepped forward, tapping her right foot to the beat of the music.
“There’s something about the beat,” Ms. Shea said in an interview. “From what I heard, it’s a half-note or quarter-note thing that throws everybody off. I just started counting to myself and seeing if my counting was right.”
Swinging the mallet with her right hand, she struck the drum at the perfect moment, sending the packed gym — and social media — into a frenzy.
A video posted by the school district on Instagram amassed more than six million views. Millions more watched Ms. Shea’s feat on YouTube, her 12-year-old son playing the video for her on their smart TV at home.
“He said ‘Mom, you’re viral,’ ” Ms. Shea said. “It was crazy.”
So what makes the song’s timing so elusive to the untrained ear? Part of it is the long space.
“It adds a good amount of drama to this already beautiful song,” said David Cowan, an associate professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston who is a drummer and a composer. “It’s a really emotional song, and then you’ve got this little slow down, and then you’ve got this expanse of space where nothing is happening, and then all of a sudden, boom. And then that sets us up for the climax of the song.”
Then, there is the varying of the tempo in the song.
“The mystery is that people don’t know where to start counting,” Professor Cowan said.
Finally, in what Mr. Foster described as an oddity, the booming of the drum lands between beats.
“It’s just so random,” he said. “It would have been so logical for me to keep it right on the beat.”
Another curiosity? The acoustics.
“I think we did it in like the bathroom of the studio to get that reverb,” Mr. Foster said of the drumbeat.
While promoting the movie “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” in late June, three of its stars, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali and Ms. Johansson, bellowed with laughter as they attempted the challenge, a video posted on social media showed.
“You have to guess when the drum comes in,” Ms. Johansson said, clapping her hands too early, then bursting into laughter while exclaiming, “No!”
Mr. Bailey went next, cradling his head in his hands in deep concentration and then falling out of his seat in hysterics when he nailed it.
In October, more than 20 soccer players for Tottenham Hotspur joined the high jinks, with just four getting the timing in a video that the club shared on TikTok.
“If this song gets stuck in your head, that’s on you,” the post read.
Some have injected humor into the challenge, including Maria Ferrer, a social media personality, who recorded herself eating a bag of Cheetos and brushing crumbs off her shirt during the song’s long pause before playfully tapping a drum and walking away.
Fans may be surprised to know that the climactic moment almost didn’t happen, as Mr. Foster recalled.
“I was friends with Dolly Parton, and I called her,” Mr. Foster said. “I said, ‘You’ll never guess what we just recorded with Whitney — your song, ‘I Will Always Love You.’ And she said, ‘Oh, that’s great. So I can’t wait to hear what you did with the third verse.’”
Mr. Foster was confused: “I went, ‘What third verse?’ ”
It turned out that the producers had been using the arrangement from Linda Ronstadt’s 1975 version of the song, which had just two verses, as a template, he said. Ms. Parton has said in interviews she insisted on Ms. Houston singing the third verse.
If one listens closely to the final version, Mr. Foster said, the sound of a keyboard playing subtly fills the void before the famous drumbeat.
“Maybe that will help people,” he said. “You know what? I should do the challenge.”
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
The post Why That Whitney Houston Drumbeat Is So Addictive, Yet Hard to Match appeared first on New York Times.
