22-Year-Old El Pasoan Goes TikTok Viral Thanks To Karaoke Video

One local El Pasoan has gone viral on TikTok after posting a karaoke video that gained nearly 4 million views overnight.

Watch this 22-year-old (@tumadreautin) from El Paso impress the heck out of TikTok when the "Spirit of Shaggy" overcomes him during karaoke night.

Imagine going to bed with only 63 followers on TikTok and waking up with over 10K followers the following day, thanks to a karaoke video that went viral globally.

That's precisely what happened to Austin Batres, a 2018 graduate of America's High School who began to work at Target off George Dieter and, thanks to their free school program, started his online college education.

Looking to try something new, Batres requested a transfer and moved to Houston, where he discovered his knack for karaoke and, sometimes, likes to drop a verse of Ave Maria at the public pool.

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Austin shared that after moving to the city, he was looking for something fun to do and came upon karaoke night at Molly's Pub, and that's where he decided to break out singing Angel by Shaggy f/ Rayvon.

Wearing a Vote for Pedro t-shirt from the 2004 Napoleon Dynamite film, @tumadreaustin proceeds to wow the crowd with his voice during the short 35-second long video.

@tumadreaustin♬ original sound - tumadreaustin

It turns out that Batres has been impersonating the Jamaican singer for years, but it wasn't until the response he got on stage at the pub that he got the idea to post the short video on social media.

Batres tells me that he posted the video on TikTok Thursday morning around 2:30 a.m., and by 9 a.m., he had garnered 200K views, and as the day went on, he was getting 100K views an hour.

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The viral video soon got picked up globally, including a German news station and Spin Magazine, and will cross over 4 million views any minute now.

So what will Austin Batres do with his newfound social media fame? He tells me that he plans to continue working at Target and maybe share a few more videos online while hopefully making some side money but doesn't plan to be swayed away from his online studies.