People Can’t Stop Listening to TV on the Radio Thanks to ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’

A few weeks ago, Tunde Adebimpe woke up to see his phone alit with messages. “That never feels like a good thing,” he tells Rolling Stone , laughing. “The first five things were from friends. They’d be, like, just a gif of Spider-Man from the Sixties series and just one word, like, ‘Yo!’ Nobody explained anything for the first five messages, so I was extra confused. But then somebody wrote and said , ‘It’s in the movie.'”

Since the movie opened on July 31, streams of “Wolf Like Me” have spiked dramatically. Up 834 percent in the last month, the song shot from around 32,300 streams on July 15 to around 269,500 on Aug. 5, and the interest has held steady. On Aug. 19, it was streamed around 217,500 times, according to music data company Luminate.

“TV on the Radio created a great song and the filmmakers created a great film, each independent of one another,” Chris Lakey, SVP of Global Creative Synch at Kobalt Music, tells Rolling Stone . His company serves as a representative for songs when music supervisors look to place them in movies. “When the right song meets the right scene, both can become something bigger. The song gives the scene new weight; the film gives the song new context, bringing it back into the cultural conversation and introducing it to a new audience. That’s what a great synch can do.”

For Adebimpe, the surge in interest is a full-circle moment in many ways. First, he describes himself as a “lapsed comic-book artist” and a “humongous comics nerd,” so watching what is essentially an homage to the first issue of Spider-Man brought to life and writ large on the silver screen, with his song playing in the background, was “definitely surreal.” He says he’d love a time machine right about now for the opportunity to tell middle school bullies, “One day I’m going to drop the nerd hammer on you, and you’re going to feel it so hard.” But what also makes him feel good about it all is the fact that, “This movie, it’s just really good.” Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

The lyrics Adebimpe wrote for “Wolf Like Me” in 2006 are about “the idea of whatever’s inside you being your true self and having that be more powerful than anything you’re trying to front as because you think there might be a danger in expressing this true self, and the idea that, at the right time, you can kick into high gear and be that true self and it would be actually for the best.” The title references Black Like Me , white journalist John Howard Griffin’s 1961 nonfiction book about darkening his skin to pass for Black in the Jim Crow South. “I don’t know how [the lyrics] crossfade with Black Like Me , but I feel like there’s something that maps onto it, at least spiritually, that I was thinking about,” he says.