A dance classic of the late aughts has been pushed back onto the charts by a pair of recent plays.
On the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart dated Sept. 7, La Roux‘s 2009 hit “Bulletproof” sits at No. 13 amid its fifth week on the chart, down from a peak position at No. 10.
The 15-year old song arrived on this chart due to a recent streaming surge caused by two unrelated uses. The first was a February commercial for the allergy medication Allegra, in which a woman sings the song acapella in an ode to how it apparently makes her bulletproof against allergens.
Streaming then surged enough for the song to chart after July 21, when Kodak Black posted a TikTok of himself vibing (and also brushing his teeth) to the track in a viral video that’s since been liked more then three million times.
This Tiktok caused a “Bulletproof” streaming jump from 707,000 to 1.8 million in the week ending July 25, and then to 3.5 million in the week ending Aug. 1, according to Luminate. The most recent comments on the 2010 “Bulletproof” music video on YouTube state that viewers arrived to the clip because of Black’s influence. (“The culture came back to this after Kodak Black,” one commenter wrote. “S–t was a banger back then.”)
While the bubbly, defiant song by the English duo was a hit on the Billboard Hot 100 upon its release on June 21, 2009, this current run marks its first appearance on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, which launched in 2013, four years after the track’s release.
Initially a hit in the United Kingdom, “Bulletproof” first reached a U.S. Billboard chart on Aug. 1, 2009, when it entered Dance Club Songs at No. 38, ultimately hitting No. 1 on the chart that September. The synth pop anthem also soared on the Hot 100, cracking the top 10 in March of 2010 when it reached No. 8. It went on to spend a whopping 27 weeks on the chart. The song was also a hit on Dance/Mix Show Airplay, where it spent 14 weeks in 2009/2010, peaking at No. 10.
The song came from the duo’s 2009 self-titled debut album, which also contained the hit “In It For the Kill.” This past June, La Roux’s Elly Jackson recently acknowledged the album’s 15-year anniversary, writing on Instagram that “this album is complex for me… without it life would be very different but it took a lot out of me that’s taken years to get back. Never thought it would take this long, so weird to think it’s fifteen years ago… I’m not even sure I can process that but here we are. Thank you to everyone that’s loved and still loves this record. My deep cuts are ‘quicksand’ and ‘colourless colour,’ let me know yours.”
