Who is ‘Nathaniel B’? The origin of the latest viral video on TikTok explained
TikToker Prince Maj has responded after footage of him in a high school rap battle went viral, giving fans the lowdown on one iconic line.
Viral moments can come from the most unexpected places and often shoot to popularity long after the original footage was first taken. The creator of a recent viral catchphrase has taken to TikTok to explain the origins of his infamous line; “Hold up, ain’t you Nathaniel B?”
Footage from 2020 shows a group of high school students engrossed in a rap battle, with an upper classman facing off against a lower classman. The younger rapper is dressed in an orange t-shirt and a brightly-coloured headband and seems to be enjoying a decent amount of support from the crowd, until he utters the now-famous line…
“That shit was trash. You can’t handle me. Hold up, ain’t you Nathaniel B?”
Two years later and the original video has received more than 2.5 million plays and garnered 397,000 likes. And as the video experienced a resurgence online, TikToker Prince Maj (@princemaj3) explained all in an online post.
What does Nathaniel B mean?
In a TikTok video posted in July Prince Maj revealed the exact circumstance that led up to the infamous moment and what he meant by the term ‘Nathaniel B’. The other students in the clip were his high school football teammates and they were enjoying some relaxation time before practice.
“I get in the circle right,” he explained on his TikTok account. “Before I even said the Nathaniel B line, we said like three or four lines.”
“The dude I was battling, I knew him personally so I knew his whole family. And so, I was about to flame him and call him his little brother, Nathaniel B.”
His rap rival had a younger brother called Nathaniel and Prince Maj simply added the suffix ‘B’, short for ‘bro’, to make the bar rhyme with the previous line. Calling his opponent by his younger brother’s name may seem like a fairly innocuous roast in a high school rap battle, but it did not get the response Prince Maj would have hoped.
Spectators in the original clip can be heard saying “What he say?” while anther yelled, “Get the fuck outta here!”
It may not have been a crowd-pleaser at the time but the TikTok audience have been much more impressed with Prince Maj’s bars.
“The rise of Nathaniel B,” one TikToker joked. “One of the greatest mysterious finally solved.”