Long before the Gold plaque and the Don Diablo feature, Christian Gates understood something most artists still do not: on the internet, the video is the song’s best salesman. So he made the videos impossible to scroll past. He lit himself on fire. He took a baseball bat to a car. He turned his own feed into a stunt show.
Content as spectacle
The stunt clips were not random chaos; they were attention engineering. An artist trying to break through on TikTok is competing with everything else on earth for a half-second of a stranger’s thumb, and a man on fire or a car getting demolished buys that half-second. Gates paired the spectacle with the music, so the people who stopped to watch the chaos left having heard the song. It is the same instinct that later made his TOXIC video a full short film instead of a lip-sync.
Made with collaborators like Moody Darkroom
Gates did not do it alone. He built these videos with visual collaborators, including Moody Darkroom, the same creative whose photo shoot later produced the title and cover concept for No Strings Attached. It is a pattern that runs through his whole career, from Moody Darkroom to his current work with Ray Shay: surround yourself with people who can help you make the thing bigger.
If a man on fire makes you stop scrolling, you also hear the song.
The through-line
The stunt era is where Gates learned the lesson that powers everything he has built since, from a Gold single to his own marketing venture Swarm: attention is the whole game, and it can be manufactured with enough nerve and a good camera. Some of the stunts got genuinely out of hand, like the Volvo he bought purely to destroy, but that willingness to actually do the crazy thing is exactly what separated him from every other bedroom artist. More in the wiki.