Do you hear saxophones? Run away.
A recent TikTok meme has users scoring their videos with a snippet of a dramatic jazzy riff that serves as a warning signal that things are about to go very wrong.
Perhaps you’ve paddled your kayak out to open water when the sky turns dark and the clouds overhead begin to rumble with thunder. Or, maybe you’re wearing white at a restaurant and you spot a waiter in your path struggling to carry a tray of six glasses of pinot noir. Or, perhaps you’ve just taken a big bite of a freshly baked cookie only to be asked, “Wait, you’re not allergic to peanuts, right?” (You are very much allergic to peanuts.)
This is when the saxophones start getting louder.
The trend began on TikTok at the end of last year and has grown in popularity through the spring and summer.
The audio has been used by people sharing moments when life — in both serious and silly ways — did not go according to plan.
For Sabrina Passoni-Vilasboa, who lives in Westchester County, N.Y., it was a recent boat trip that suddenly took a turn. Passoni-Vilasboa, 25, and friends were on a Connecticut lake in a mostly uncovered boat when large storm clouds appeared on the horizon and the wind and waves kicked up. A storm suddenly started pelting them with rain, and she captured the moment and set it to the saxophone audio.
“It started pouring, and the rain was cold and the water hitting our bodies so hard it hurt,” Passoni-Vilasboa, an administrative assistant, said.
This particular saxophone tune comes from John Singleton’s seminal 1991 film “Boyz N the Hood,” and it underscores a pivotal scene in which Ricky (Morris Chestnut), an aspiring football player and young father, is killed in a drive-by shooting. The music was revived around December 2025, when a TikTok user posted a video using a clip of the riff and describing the movie plot. Since then, thousands of videos have made it the sound of the summer — a turn from last summer’s ubiquitous, gaffe-filled Jet2 holiday audio.
Kirk Whalum, the Grammy Award-winning saxophonist who performed the original riff, said it was improvised. “There was no music, there was no, you know, ‘Here look at the chart and read here,’” Whalum, who lives in Memphis, said in an interview.
Whalum recalled a recording session in Los Angeles where Stanley Clarke, the composer of the film’s score, showed him the scene.
Clarke then cued up the scene again for Whalum to play to. He remembered nailing it in one try. It brought up emotions for him about being a Black man in the United States, the legacy of Jim Crow and “the inner sort of grieving we do on a daily basis,” he said. “That all came together for me as a kind of catharsis in that moment, which I didn’t know that I was looking for that day,” he recalled.
He described how the “dynamic range of the saxophone” made it a perfect instrument for encapsulating an array of sentiments, including “tenderness or love or raunchy and all the way to ‘Boyz N the Hood.’”
He added: “I wasn’t trying to get anything ‘right.’ Your feelings are your feelings.”
Sydney Sharpe, 22, recently used the saxophone sound for a video from her college graduation photo shoot, in which a persistent friend was seen running back and forth in the background waving a colorful smoke bomb meant to lend a dramatic effect to the photos. In reality, the smoke bomb was slowly burning her friend’s hand, said Sharpe, a patient services representative in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Mai Lewally, who lives in Houston, used the sound with pictures of a failed birthday cake that arrived from the bakery looking nothing like the inspiration photos provided. The saxophones made for cinematic buildup, she said.
“It’s a mix of humor and relatability,” Lewally, 40, who works in marketing, said. “People just love seeing expectations-versus-reality moments.”
Not everyone was finding that humor, however.
Taylor Powell, 30, a content creator known online as Cindy Noir, posted an Instagram video describing how she had been frustrated to see “Boyz N the Hood” being reduced to a viral sound and used alongside clips of relatively minor inconveniences.
“I don’t like the trend,” Powell, who lives in Atlanta, said in an interview. “I find that it is making light of a very tragic moment in a movie that unfortunately a lot of Black people can relate to.”
She added that it felt like another instance in which Black culture was being appropriated, without full context, for an internet trend.
Whalum, the saxophonist, had a theory as to why the riff was resonating widely in this moment.
“I think something like this becoming viral has a lot to do with the moment we’re in,” he said. “Like what would it sound like if I let all my frustration out at once?”
Now, about 35 years after “Boyz N the Hood,” Whalum said some of his family members had happened upon the saxophone audio and had been surprised to learn it was him. His son, a bassist, called him recently to ask about the film after he noticed the trend.
“We have four kids and seven grandkids,” he said. “None of my kids knew that was me.”
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