Leah Halton "Praise Jah In The Moonlight"

About

Leah Halton "Praise Jah In The Moonlight" refers to a viral TikTok lipsync video by Australian influencer Leah Halton (@looooooooch) that gained hundreds of millions of views and tens of millions of likes in early 2024, rivaling Bella Poarch's M to the B video and the chocolate strawberries video as one of the most-liked and most-viewed TikTok videos of all time.

Origin

On February 5th, 2024, Leah Halton (@looooooooch on TikTok) posted a video seen below.^[1] Over the course of roughly three months between February 5th and April 15th, 2024, the video received over 646 million views and nearly 45 million likes.

At 12 seconds long, the video features her lip-synching to the song "Praise Jah In The Moonlight" by YG Marley, son of Lauryn Hill and grandson of Bob Marley. The song, co-written with Hill, had previously gone viral as a sound on TikTok and trending song on streaming platforms.^[2] The lyrics Halton lip-syncs are:

These roads of flames are catching a fire, ahh
Showed you I loved you, and you called me a liar
Oh, no, no, no, no, no

Halton maintains a social media presence across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and X. Her YouTube, which was her first platform, has over 1.24 million subscribers as of April 2024,^[6] while her Instagram has over 1.3 million^[7] and her TikTok has over 7.2 million.^[8] Halton's content on TikTok often uses the "inverted" filter, meaning that the face recorded on camera is flipped so that it shows the face the same way a person would typically see themselves in the mirror. Her content on other platforms ranges through several different genres including fitness videos, story times and "haul" videos after shopping trips.

Spread

As Halton's viral video garnered attention in early 2024, users on TikTok compared the performance of the Halton video to other TikTok videos with famously high views and likes. Many speculated about whether Halton deserved the high level of interaction her video received.

On April 10th, 2024, Halton made a follow-up TikTok reenacting the original and captioned it "POV: that one girl with 20 million likes, like does she really deserve it?" earning another 6.5 million likes and 120 million views in five days (seen below).^[3]

In the comments to that video, users compared the performance of Halton's "Praise Jah In The Moonlight" to other famous videos. Judging by user comments tracking the number of likes on the video and Halton's own number of "20 million," it appears that the video gained around 25 million likes over the five days between April 10th to April 15th.

Many users marveled at the already highly successful post's continued rise in the comments (seen below) and checked in with one another about when they saw the video and where its like count stood when they saw it. Halton was also compared to Bella Poarch, the maker of what remains the most-liked TikTok video ever (breakdown seen below).

Others parodied and commented on the extremely successful Halton video, such as TikToker @iconicfatma on April 12th, 2024, who earned over 1 million views and 75,000 likes in three days (shown below, left), which imagined a cartoon version of Halton singing the song.^[4] On April 13th, internet culture commentator Noah Glenn Carter also commented on Halton's video, earning over 3.1 million views and 173,000 likes in two days, clarifying that Leah Halton is not single (shown below, right).^[5]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References