(this resource is being slowly updated as more information is uncovered)
The account commonly known as @r00ts_au on Instagram began life under a different name: @okcoolbutcharlixcx, active circa 2019-2021. This Charli XCX fanpage would have gone down in history as relatively unremarkable but for two notable facts. Firstly, it was a rare example of a "three-way fanpage", celebrating not only Charli XCX but also her contemporary internet cult celebrities Carly Rae Jepsen and Playboi Carti - or as they were referred to, "the three Cs". The page posted photo- and audio-visual edits of the three artists both in isolation and in fictional collaboration. The most notable achievement of @okcoolbutcharlixcx was to create a meme. This meme which edited the album art of 2017 mixtape "Pop 2" to replace Charli XCX with Mia Wallace from 1994 indie film "Pulp Fiction". The remarkable resemblance in the corporal composition of the two images as well as the then budding association between Charli XCX and drugs cocaine made for a uncanny, prescient piece which enojyed minor virality. When the meme was then reposted by a larger Charli XCX fanpage, @memesofcharli, it was Instagram-liked by @charli_xcx (aka Charli XCX). This achievement, on August 12 2019, was certainly the high point in the short-lived career of @okcoolbutcharlixcx.
The meme in question
However, there was still time to pass before @okcoolbutcharlixcx would have any semblance of becoming the @r00ts_au we all know and love. Across 2020 and 2021, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and all of the three Cs dropping music, @okcoolbutcharlixcx began to slowly derail in focus. Smattered alongside the expected updates and news were posts about live Grime music, a collaboration between SOPHIE, AJ Tracey and Iglooghost, and gradually more unhinged, reality-warping edits of CXCX, CRJ, and PC. These edits were an early forbearer to the early @r00ts_au visual language and edits that were to come. The final post of @okcoolbutcharlixcx era was in contrast ominously plain: a simple phone camera image of a laptop screen open on a YouTube video titled "CARTI XCX - c2.0 freestyle". The framing is but partial, tantalisingly cutting off the right-hand column of reccomendations. However, the image is not totally context-void: a cryptic array of tab titles is evident, as well as the brand of the computer: Dell. Most tellingly of all is the blue-imbued thumb-up icon, the indicator of deliberate, emotive human action. The so-called "this is the riddim" post was a fitting end to the @okccoolbutcharlixcx era, existing as it does in an unresolved tension between the disembodied, ever-descending rabbithole of internet music fandom and the fleshy human host that it will either augment or consume. This conflict would become one of the defining drivers of @r00ts_au.
The "this is the riddim" post: the haunting final work of @okcoolbutcharlixcx
Before we reach the dawn of the @r00ts_au era, there is one more important to post to examine. On 9 December 2020, 3 months before the "this is the riddim" post sounded the death knell for @okcoolbutcharlixcx, the account made a post that, in hindsight, was the ancestor of every post to come under the @r00ts_au regime. This post, now known as the ""sum aussie tunes for your headtop"" post and still visible at the bottom of the contemporary @r00ts_au timeline, was a list of "My Hottest 100 Votes". It contained only Australian artists, ranging across rap, pop, and electronic music. Most of the artists on the list would not go on to be featured on @r00ts_au down the road, rather be they the previous generation of aus internet artists or those who existed in more mainstream lanes of rap, pop, and electronic music. However, top and center was Ninajirachi's "Alight", an artist who, as the 2026 reader will know, would go on to be pivotal in both the story of @r00ts_au and aus internet music more broadly.
The ""sum aussie tunes for your headtop"" post: a sign of things to come