因果(Karma Code)

Cause and effect

Karma Code is the second half of a pair. It shares a single music video with Stacks from All Sides, which runs straight from one song into the other, and Sixth Tone describes the character the video follows as a familiar Guangdong type: a fortune-seeking young man who dreads karmic retribution for his blackmail and loan-shark schemes.

Newsgd, a Guangdong provincial news site, reads the two songs together as a humorous satire of people who seek divine help while trying to make money by illegal means, and who in the end face retribution. In Wikipedia’s account, Karma Code shows the protagonist confronted by traditional Chinese deities over his unethical rise; he first tries to appease them, then to shift the blame, and finally has to reflect on what he has done.

Sound and samples

Like the rest of the album, Karma Code is built on Memphis rap, a Southern US hip-hop style, filled with Cantonese folk imagery. Newsgd credits the pair’s simple, highly repetitive melodies, strong rhythm and samples of Korean songs for their appeal to listeners who do not understand the words. According to Wikipedia, the intro of Karma Code samples music from the 1986 Chinese television series Journey to the West.

Skai Isyourgod raps mainly in Mandarin, but, as Sixth Tone notes, his delivery is studded with Hakka, Cantonese and Teochew words, reflecting the mix of dialects in his hometown of Huizhou. Sixth Tone suggests that this may be another key to his success among overseas Chinese, because it resembles the speech of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and adds that more than a few Malaysian fans commented that they had first thought he was Malaysian Chinese.

From Douyin to the world

Karma Code’s opening lines, a folk-style blessing, became a meme of their own. Newsgd says what made those lines go viral, on both Chinese and international platforms, was AI-generated videos of pets, especially cats, that seem to sing them with awkward Chinese-to-English subtitles; a photo caption adds that Giselle of the K-pop group aespa learned to say the first line in Chinese during a live broadcast. Wikipedia records a meme known as the dog singing in Chinese, built on the same opening, that drew more than 10 million views.

According to Sixth Tone, the combined video for Stacks from All Sides and Karma Code first took off on Douyin, then among overseas Chinese on TikTok, and then with audiences who speak no Chinese, reaching 26 million views on YouTube. Sixth Tone also reported that in July 2025 he surpassed Jay Chou as the most-streamed Mandarin musician on Spotify, with nearly 5 million monthly listeners.

About Skai Isyourgod

Skai Isyourgod, whose Chinese stage name is 揽佬 (Lanlao), was born in 1998 in Huizhou, Guangdong, studied performing arts at Sichuan Media College in Chengdu, and released his first album in September 2023. In Emblem World, Karma Code sits in the China music collection beside Stacks from All Sides and Blueprint Supreme, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.