How Galaxy Gas Took Over The Rap Internet

On July 16, a restaurant in the Atlanta suburb of College Park, Georgia, posted a video on their Instagram account that was viewed over 38 million times before it was taken down. In the clip’s opening seconds, a young-looking customer in a black ski mask and blue hoodie twists the nozzle and inhales from a long, colorful canister of nitrous oxide. His voice sounds cartoonishly pitched down from the gas when he tells the person behind the camera, “My name Lil Tae, man.” In the weeks after the video was posted, Lil Tae became a meme; people on TikTok imitated his voice in parodies, edited in Goku from Dragon Ball Z, and made a Roblox reenactment of the original video. In a post that racked up over five million views on TikTok, one user shared a fake announcement claiming Lil Tae had died from inhaling “to [sic] much Galaxy Gas.”

Over the phone from Atlanta, Lil Tae tells me he went to jail over an unrelated incident a week after the restaurant posted the video. When the 18-year-old got out around a month later, his phone was full of memes and messages asking if he was still alive. He first heard about Galaxy Gas, the brand name clearly visible on the side of the nitrous oxide canister he’s holding in the video, earlier that summer when his friend started doing it. Though the video seems like a stunt, Lil Tae says it happened spontaneously. “I forgot I had it right here with me,” he says. “I ain’t plan to do that or nothing.” He doesn’t mind the memes (“Shit’s funny”), or that he seems to have become the face of Galaxy Gas (“I ain’t tripping”) though he says he no longer uses it.