JAKARTA—A meme in Indonesia about honking bus horns has gone viral, sparking a craze that has swept the dance-music world and sent social media into a tizzy trying to figure out what it means.
The phrase is "Om Telolet Om"—or "Uncle, Honk Your Horn, Uncle" —something kids shout out, hold up signs saying or simply gesticulate to get bus drivers to honk their horns. Videos of the resulting cacophony are posted online.
The fun has catapulted to internet stardom, and by Thursday, dance-music producers inundated by Indonesia's internet youths had created remixes using the horn-honking melody, a sound that mimics the word telolet.
Billboard, which picked up on the trend and tried to explain it, put out a roundup of the top six Om Telolet Om beats. The phrase has spanned the globe, from Australia to Thailand to the U.S., even if most people don't fully get the joke.
So how did a meme that has puzzled most of the world get started?
It goes back to last year, when new intercity buses in this nation of 250 million people and 18,000 islands straddling the Pacific and Indian Oceans came out with horns that play an unusual melody, rather than a single-note blare.
Youths, delighted by the new honk, began writing the phrase on pieces of paper to greet passing buses. Videos circulated of youths celebrating when they got a response.
Early this week, the phrase started trending when youths flooded the social-media accounts of musicians, DJs and celebrities everywhere. The phrase was even posted in the comments section of President-elect Donald Trump's official Instagram account thousands of times. He hasn't responded.
Well-known international dance-music artists such as Zedd and DJ Snake picked it up and sent out tweets with the phrase. Other artists, puzzled by the hottest thing sweeping the internet, asked what it meant.
Reactions began pouring in, ranging from pride to hilarity to embarrassment in Indonesia, one of the world's biggest strongholds for Facebook and Twitter. At its peak Wednesday, it was drawing 1,800 tweets a minute and was the No. 1 trending tweet world-wide around 2:30 p.m. Jakarta time , according to data from the social-media company. As of Thursday, Twitter had recorded 1.5 million tweets related to the phrase.
Karim Metwaly, an American YouTube celebrity, circulated a video on Twitter using the meme on a truck in New York City. "We doing this everywhere in New York from now on," he wrote.
Artists such as Austin Mahone, an American singer and songwriter, and Dutch duo Firebeatz made remixes using the horn and uploaded them on SoundCloud.
"Saw about 15k comments & tweets w this so looked into it and here you go," Mr. Mahone wrote.
Indonesia's Ministry of Transportation said Thursday that it would hold a telolet competition early next year to capture the momentum, which it says could help popularize public bus travel.
Indonesians like to be social and to joke, and they have brought those characteristics to the internet, said Shafiq Pontoh, chief strategy officer at Provetic, a strategic consultancy in Jakarta. Now, they are understanding how using the internet they can "become present in the global environment."
—Anita Rachman contributed to this article.
Write to Sara Schonhardt at Sara.Schonhardt@wsj.com
Source: Honk It Up, Uncle: Indonesia's Bus Horns Capture Global Attention
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