A boy in a Helsinki metro station points a small silver remote at strangers and freezes them mid-step. The device is not magic, it is a Sony Walkman MiniDisc player, and the song he is listening to is about to become one of the most unexpected hits of the new millennium. On October 30, 1999, the Finnish duo Bomfunk MC's released Freestyler as a single in Finland, the third cut from their debut album In Stereo. Nobody could have guessed that a breakbeat track built on British dance culture, drum and bass, and hip-hop would soon top charts in more than ten countries.
Chart run and production credits
The song was written by Raymond Ebanks and Jaakko Salovaara, with Salovaara also producing under the name JS16. It came out on the Epidrome label and first reached number four in the Finnish singles chart. The international release followed in February 2000, and that is when Freestyler turned into a phenomenon. It hit number one in Australia, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and Sweden, and climbed to number two in the United Kingdom. The track ran at 164 beats per minute in E minor, fast enough to feel like a chase through a tunnel.
The video did as much as the song. Most of it was shot at Hakaniemi metro station in Helsinki, a deep underground stop whose platforms sit 21 meters below sea level. The star was Marlo Snellman, a Finnish model and musician who was 15 years old at the time. He got the role through his mother, the modeling magnate Laila Snellman. In the clip, Marlo's character listens to Freestyler on a Sony Walkman MZ-R55 MiniDisc player and uses its remote to stop, rewind, and speed up the people around him. Even the main character from the group's earlier video Uprocking Beats gets frozen in one scene.
Hakaniemi station and the MiniDisc remote
The video had a small flaw that fans loved to spot: the number on the train carriage changes from shot to shot, a continuity error that only made the clip feel more alive. The image of a teenager controlling a crowd with a tiny gadget captured something about the turn of the century, when portable music players were becoming personal superpowers. The song's genre, a mix of breakbeat, electronic dance music, drum and bass, and hip-hop, matched that feeling of speed and control.
Two decades later, the song still had enough pull to inspire a remake. In 2019, for the 20th anniversary, Bomfunk MC's released a new video with the original members. This time the central figure was a girl with a mobile phone, played by Milica Bajčetić. The shoot took place at Vukov Spomenik, another underground station, this one in Belgrade, Serbia. The update swapped the MiniDisc remote for a smartphone, but the idea stayed the same: one person, one device, and a whole platform of people at their command.
Freestyler never needed a grand story to work. It was a Finnish single that sounded like a British rave, sung by a duo who trusted a teenager to carry their video. The result was a track that topped charts across Europe and reached number two in the UK, while the American market only gave it a modest spot on a Billboard sales chart. The song's real home was always the underground, the metro, the place where a boy with a remote could make the world pause.