Tiktok certainly has had a journey to become the behmoth it is today. Starting out as Musical.ly, the app’s userbase was mostly fringe sub-cultures, the goths, the furries, and whatever the hell Cash and Maverick Baker can be called. Soon after rebranding to Tiktok, multiple compilations were made on youtube, showing how cringe and lame its userbase was, which caused a surge of new users to populate the app, resulting in one of the largest outpourings of internet irony since 2016. Suddenly the skits and videos this new ironic crowd was making gave the app a new noteriety as being a potential replacement for Vine.
Now though, as one of the first apps to have its users primarily be Generation-Z, one notorious for having outspoken fringe political ideologies, and a sense of humor that leans more on the random side like early millenials, Tiktok has now oddly become a replacement for Tumblr, only with the aesthetic focus being on music rather than pictures. This has resulted in another boost for the music industry, artists, and fans looking for new songs.
It’s also had to deal ith the baggage of being a Chinese-owned app, meaning Xi Jinping can do exactly what every other app on your phone is already doing. There was even a looming threat that the app would get banned in the United States just on the merit of it being Chinese-owned. Much to Mark Zuckerberg’s dismay, that didn’t happen, forcing Instagram Reels to stay dead.
Much can be said about Tiktok’s culture, but one thing that can’t be denied is that it is a great way to discover new songs.
Unfortunately, you can only hear the hook to an 80s synth pop song so many times before it starts to sound like the flies that buzz over the corpse of a dead possum on the sidewalk of a Florida street on a summer day.
Now, I have 0 problem with people finding songs through methods other than listening to their Spotify release radar or reading GSC. A good chunk of my music taste when I was a teenager actually came from playing the NHL video games and watching highlight videos on Youtube. A song having a new fanbase is never a bad thing, especially when it consists of people that never would have heard it otherwise.
Tiktok has given tons of songs attention they wouldn’t otherwise ever get, most notably being Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.
That said, Safety Dance wasn’t any better of a song when it was popular, and actually got worse with each subsequent play.
Tiktok has that same effect on a lot of its songs, since so many tracks are indicative of a certain “vibe” and people all want to take turns capturing that vibe. With each use, the vibe gets distorted, almost like a virus that perpetually mutates. The song hits different each time the user hears it, and sometimes it’ll trigger nothing but absolute disgust.
Some of the songs where that’s happened include but are not limited to:
Renai Circulation
The fact that I hate this song now only gets me more angry. One of the great meme anthems of all time, genuinely up there with It’s The Nutshack and We Are Number One, it has one of the most infectious hooks with its lively brass section, and lyrics sweet enough to balance out my blood-sugar levels. Tiktok somehow made me dislike a meme-song through overexposure. This is due in part to the fact that once weebs get a song they all like, every body has to take turns using it. I’m sure the veterans of the yaoi-paddle era will remember when Caramelldansen was on permanent repeat throughout the halls of their local convention center.
More egregious though is that they started using the song’s English cover, probably because it’s easier to lip-sync. Since then, every cosplayer worth a damn suddenly has ten videos of them belting out the, “la-di-da-di-da, la-di-da-di-di” part in different outfits. Similarly, every tiktok leftists has this as the background as they dance while blocks of text detail their increasingly neurotic and over-developed niche ideologies.
Cosplayers, Belle Delphine lookalikes, and crypto-queer-paleo-consverative-augustinian-leninst-maoist-feminists, I’m beggin ya. Give this one a rest.
Everybody Wants To Rule The World
This song was never good to begin with, but TikTok found a way to make it even worse.
Nostalgia for any time period that one hasn’t lived in is merely an admission that the individual does not fit in their own era. Twitter and Tumblr saw a massive surge of that type of nostalgia in the 2010’s, with the phrase Forever Wishing I Was A Teen In The Fifties. I hope that people who legitimately had that type of nostalgia are aware that they can still dress like an idiot and order a milkshake at their local diner today. Even better they don’t have to worry about as much of the baggage that the fifties had.
It’s the same for Tiktok with this song, where, for whatever reason, Generation-Z projected their nostalgia onto the 1980s. Personally, I blame Stranger Things. Still though, Tears For Fears’ slow-moving, boring, and meaningless ballad has become the definitive background track for kids getting nostalgic over going to shopping malls, drinking the worst version of Coca-Cola, having to rewind VHS tapes, not being able to post dumb crap on the internet, and having the DJ of your radio station talk over the outro of your favorite song that you were taping.
A lot of those videos have also tend to focus on high school, but none of the footage in those videos has those doing anything that a student can’t do now. You can eat hamburgers and goof around today! I believe in you!
This subgenre of high school nostalgia can even go as recent as 2010, proving that Gen-Z would be nostalgic for yesterday if you let them.
To be fair, that’s probably the bi-product of growing up with a pandemic totally changing how the world was percieved.
IRA Rally Songs
I think it’s time that we come to our senses again, just like we did with our collective Mumford and Sons phase, and realize that we actually don’t like folk music that much.
For a while, these songs offered a reprieve from the likes of Ed Sheeran and Niall Horan as reminders that Irish music didn’t in fact have to be terrible. They were fun anti-imperialist anthems that mocked the British millitary’s occupation, as well as the monarchy, which always stands to be taken down a peg or nine.
Unfortunately through proliferation, they’ve lost their meaning. Instead of being a fun song to be a republican to, it’s just another meme now. This is the equivalent of that band kid who plays a bass boosted version of the USSR’s anthem on the back of the school bus. Save these jams for whenever your local Flannery’s, O’Riely’s, Connolly’s, or O’Malley’s is doing karaoke night.
Arigato, Nya!
Japanese as a language has become so fetishized by weebs that a song, which lyrics translate to “Thank you! Meow! One, two, three, meow!” has taken over the app. At this point too, Tiktok has way too many songs that serve as the background where the dancer in question pretends to be a cat. Cat Lick Moon, this song, Bass Da Da Da, and the remix Ke Cap Gap Ba Gia have all incorpated the “put your hands out like paws, then lick upward” dance move. Double-whammy, played-out dance moves for a played-out song.
Perhaps Tiktok needs some Asian songs about monkeys so we can start impersonating them. Now that would be bananas.
Sugar Crash
Okay, remember when you first found out about Death Grips, and it was awesome because there was literally nobody that sounded like them on the market? It made them feel special for existing, and you feel special for finding them. And then you listen to Yeezus for the first time, and instead of running away scared like all the plebs did, you just walk away dissappointed, thinking “This is just a worse version Death Grips.”
Sugar Crash is that but for 100Gecs.
