About

Violent Crimes refers to a TikTok photo slideshows trend where people use lyrics from Kanye West's song "Violent Crimes" to create funny stories with wholesome pictures (particularly pictures of monkeys) about people's normal life activities. The trend began in September 2022, with mostly boyfriend/girlfriend stories being posted and later expanding to other types of content, such as school life or preparing to go to work.

Origin

Released on June 1st, 2018 and later uploaded on Kanye West's official YouTube^[1] account, the song "Violent Crimes" has gathered over 17 million views in nearly 5 years (seen below).

On May 6th, 2022, TikToker^[2] @sfyedoom posted a sped-up version of the music with the lyrics, which was used as a sound for this post by @anaissmoreiira^[3] (see below) on September 26th, 2022 about the preparations she does before meeting her boyfriend. Instead of using pictures of her, she uses several monkey meme images and used a caption for each image to describe her thoughts. The video had 1.7 million views and 320 million likes in two weeks.

Spread

The trend began gaining traction in consecutive days, especially with other Spanish and Brazilian-Portuguese users, replicating the Photo Slideshows with monkeys. It had a resurgence of popularity beginning in late September 2022. The speed-up version of Kanye's song "Violent Crimes" accumulated over 75,000 videos uploaded on TikTok.

One of the first videos to deviate slightly from the original trend and use images other than monkeys was this video by @jessicalonaz, which was uploaded to TikTok^[4] on September 27th, 2022. This one featured images of a child instead of monkeys, and several other TikToks to follow copied this trend. It earned over 176,000 likes in approximately one week (seen below).