Lil Tay music video racks up 2.5 million views, weeks after online death hoax

Lil Tay is seen in a still image from her music video, "Sucker 4 Green." (YouTube)

Weeks after a widely reported death hoax, social media start Lil Tay re-emerged over the weekend with a music video that quickly racked up millions of views on YouTube.

The video for Tay's song, "Sucker 4 Green," features the wads of cash and exotic sports cars that were a staple of the Vancouver teenager's viral Instagram posts from 2018, when she was just nine years old.

"Ya'll don't know what the (expletive)'s going on," Tay said in an accompanying live stream broadcast to her five million Instagram followers. "Lil Tay's back. It's been five years and y'all still broke."

The music video and live stream – along with a sighting in Los Angeles this week – marked the first public appearances for Tay since a post announcing her death was shared on her account in August.

The news made it to numerous Canadian, American and international media outlets, including Variety, the L.A. Times and The Guardian, before her family confirmed she was alive in a statement, provided exclusively to gossip website TMZ, that blamed the hoax on a hacker.

Tay's live stream began with the teenager showing off her musical skills – she performed an acoustic guitar rendition of "Hotel California" by The Eagles before pulling out an electric guitar to play "Master of Puppets" by Metallica – then segued into a long explanation for her sudden disappearance from the spotlight five years ago.

Tay blamed a family dispute that had been playing out in the courts, but has apparently ended.

"I'm free now and I just dropped my music video and I'm ready to move on, we are done with this," she said. "Thank you for supporting me, go watch the video, (expletive)."

Tay's massive online following initially grew from a series of videos showing the child swearing, posing with stacks of $100 bills and bragging about buying expensive sports cars, despite her young age.

One of the videos purported to show Tay in an apartment overlooking the Hollywood Hills, but was actually recorded in a Metro Vancouver property that was represented by her mother, real estate agent Angela Tian.

After Tian’s client recognized the property, she resigned from her job at Pacific Evergreen Realty.