“It was playing when I first met Priscilla at a college party, so every year we listen to it on our dating anniversary”: Mark Zuckerberg has made and released an acoustic cover of a hip-hop record, as a romantic gesture

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook founder, Meta boss and one of the richest men in the world – has made a hip-hop record. As a tribute to his wife.

The track, Get Low, is a cover of a song from 2003 by Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz. Zuckerberg has recorded it in collaboration with the rapper T-Pain, under the name Z-Pain and he says he’s done this in honour of his other half, Priscilla Chan, and their ‘dating anniversary’.

All very sweet and everything. Most people stick to flowers or take their partner out to dinner. Mark Zuckerberg makes a hip-hop record. Here’s the original version:

Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz - Get Low (feat. Lil Jon, Lil Jon, Lil Jon, Lil Jon, Lil Jon) - YouTube

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Hardly up there with Three Times A Lady, is it?

Zuckerberg explained the deep connection the couple have to the tune on an Instagram post: “Get Low was playing when I first met Priscilla at a college party, so every year we listen to it on our dating anniversary. This year I worked with T-Pain on our own version of this lyrical masterpiece,” he wrote before signing off the post, “Love you P.”

(He’s surely taking the mickey describing Get Low as a “lyrical masterpiece”. As you can tell here, it’s, shall we say, ‘of its time’.)

The post included a photo of lyrics, an album cover in which T-Pain and Zuckerberg are both holding up acoustic guitars, and pics of the pair in a recording studio.

Zuckerberg also shared Chan’s reaction to the song. She described it as “so romantic”, writing “21 years later, I can’t get quite as low, but it brings back a lot of fun memories.”

Somewhere in California, Chuck D is quietly seething. Wasn’t hip-hop supposed to be “black people's CNN”? A counter-cultural force to liberate an oppressed section of US society? Not a vehicle for egregiously-rich tech entrepreneurs to get all lovey-dovey?

Anyhoo, Zuckerberg isn’t the first of his class to do this. Inevitably, his rival – Tesla boss, Twitter/ X owner Elon Musk - got there first. Three years ago Musk released a pumping dance track about NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as an NFT. Even before then he had dabbled in music, releasing trance tracks Don’t Doubt ur Vibe and RIP Harambe on Soundcloud. Annoyingly, they’re actually not that bad. Check them out here…

If you're interested Get Low by Z-Pain is now up on Spotify, and handily below. Enjoy.