A mother has revealed the one hip hop song that she listened to during her pregnancy, which is now the tune that soothes her two-month-old son, Jackson.
The parent, Melissa, shared a video on Instagram earlier this month of herself holding her baby, while he was crying. As she cradled her child, she spoke to her Amazon Alexa device and asked it to play one song: “Get Low” by Lil John.
Once the music started, the two-year-old stopped crying. The mother proceeded to hold her baby in her arms and danced with him.
In the text over the video, the mother confessed that she used to play this song pretty frequently. “Can you tell I listened to this a bit too much in my pregnancy,” she wrote, along with a laughing face with tears of joy emoji.
She noted that while this song soothes her baby now, that wasn’t the case when she was pregnant.
“Anyone else’s babies get soothed to a random song?” she wrote in the caption. “I used to play this all the time in my third trimester to try and get Jackson head down and engaged… it did not work haha!!”
The video quickly went viral on social media, with Lil John himself going to comments of the Instagram post to respond. “Wowwwww,” he wrote, along with a laughing face emoji.
Melissa also shared this video on TikTok, where it has more than 12m views. In the comments, many viewers poked fun at the baby’s love for hip hop and shared how they could relate to the mother’s experience.
“Keep this video. Protect it at all costs. On HIS WEDDING DAY, this will be your mother son dance, and play this video in the background,” one joked.
“Mine stops immediately when ‘Life is a Highway’ comes on lol. We watch Cars a lot,” another added.
A third wrote: “My daughter loved Harry Styles for some reason lol. So much so [that] I ended last year in top 5 per cent of Spotify listeners for him.”
During an interview with Today.com, Melissa emphasised that she and her husband, Zach, played the song in their house, while she was pregnant.
“I listened to it a lot in the latter half of my pregnancy because I was trying to get him low, and then I listened to it on repeat a good few times a day for probably three, four weeks on end,” she explain.
In addition, she noted that Zach would dance to Lil John in the kitchen, throughout her pregnancy, which has been a ritual that he’s continued, even after his child was born.
Although Melissa said that she plays the song at least once or twice a day to get her baby to fall asleep, she didn’t expect this tune to be the one that soothes him.
She told Today.com that when there was a day where her son was crying a lot, she randomly decided to play a song that she usually listened to when pregnant. When she played it that day, she then noticed that her son was asleep by the end of the song and thought she found a ritual to help him relax.
Melissa also opened up about the responses to her video and how much she’s loved seeing parents who have certain songs that calm their babies down.
“Especially going through motherhood, it’s so relatable because you really do do anything to soothe your baby,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter what it consists of.”
The Independent has contacted Melissa for comment.
Over the years, researchers have examined how music can affect babies who are not yet born. A study published in the journal PLoS One in 2013 found that babies who repeatedly heard one melody while in the womb could later recognise this song, after they were born.
