People keep linking to that "people are getting tired of the TikTok music formula" NBC thinkpiece: in newsletters, in tweets, probably in TikToks themselves. I have seen it endorsed at least three times by this point.
The piece is really bad! Specifically, it's bad in a way I've seen over and over again in my years as a pop music critic, in which deeply flawed articles become consensus faves, wisdom to be drive-by linked to for years to come, because they pander to some combination of "pop music bad," "social media bad," and "kids these days bad." This one achieves the threepeat. Some of its many problems:
- The conflation of "TikTok music" with a very specific kind of pop by American teenage girls. This omits, to name a few massively popular genres, rap and in particular drill, or Latin music and in particular reggaeton. (And, improbably, Life Without Buildings.) For that matter, it omits the huge swath of pop music made in non-Western countries, such as the enormous commercial juggernaut that is K-pop. The entire premise of TikTok is that it shows you what you already pay attention to -- approvingly or not -- and hides from you what you don't. This intentional feedback loop, combined with its unintentionally (?) garbage UI, means you have to do actual research to know what's monoculture, or at least monoculture-ish, and what's merely your own personal FYP. But TikTok "charts" are very easily findable -- here's one -- and while the actual numbers are most likely bullshit, the breadth of artists, genres and languages suggests that "TikTok music" is not a monolithic thing, let alone the thing this article says it is.
- The fact that there is payola in the music industry, treated like a shocking new development
- The fact that a lot of young artists have rich or famous parents, treated like a shocking new development1
- The fact that hit singles draw imitators, treated like a shocking new development
- The fact that many artists heavily sample or interpolate other familiar songs, or stir up controversy and shock value, that audiences often eat it up, and thus that labels encourage them to do so, treated like a shocking new development
- The idea that anger and betrayal don't count as "deeper vulnerabilities" (?!?!?!?) and thus are lesser songwriting material
- The idea that a song being "relatable" is a flaw, rather than the way people develop emotional connections to music. What do you think people get out of love songs, or unrequited love songs, or breakup albums? Abstract art appreciation?
- The idea that writing a good song must take a long time and hundreds of drafts. This is one of those cheap perennial gotchas, having little correlation to the actual creative processes of great songwriters or the deadline-based nature of labels like Motown. It's also confirmation bias: the reason we know how much or how little time any given song took to write is that the artist got famous enough for someone to interview them about it. Even then, not every single musician has broken down every single composition. Do you know how long your favorite songs took to write? Would you bet money on your guess being right?
- The constant harping on "genuine expression" and how bad everyone else is at it. First, most obviously, this implicitly defines "genuine expression" as "music I like," which speaks for itself. For many musicians, the "TikTok style" is how they genuinely express themselves, especially when those musicians are teenagers for whom social media and megastars like Billie Eilish were their first real immersion in a musical world.2 And even if "genuine expression" can be determined objectively, it's yet another thing that has little correlation to musical quality. Many musicians genuinely express themselves through masterpieces; probably more musicians genuinely express themselves through absolute dogshit.3. Many artists write masterpieces that have little to do with personal expression -- a hugely common pet peeve among songwriters is people parasocially assuming that all of their songs are confessional expressions of their unfiltered real-life feelings. And many artists write songs with no ambition beyond making planetfuls of money. Even these can end up recognized as masterpieces; even the ones that don't are invariably fondly remembered by someone.4
- The big underlying problem, that unites all the little problems: Most of this piece's criticism of viral music TikToks comes, itself, from viral TikToks: a reaction video by "callinallgamers," some snackable lessons by online songwriting teachers. These, themselves, are prime examples of viral pandering -- probably more so than the music. Jumping on a pre-existing TikTok trend by pulling a few faces and picking the same few low-hanging lolz other users did is pandering to virality. Giving MasterClass-level advice that flatters people's people's pre-existing ideas about authenticity and hard work is pandering to virality. Much of this is valueless; none of it is original.
- To see this at work, let's look at one song the writer singles out: "Like a Woman" by Savana Santos, whom I'd never heard of but also I'm an Old so that means nothing. The song's inclusion in this thinkpiece is rather out of place; from what I can tell, Santos didn't interpolate any nursery rhymes or cuss more than the average teenager does -- which are the hallmarks of "TikTok music," supposedly -- but has rather written something of the same varietal of homophobia as Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl." The song seems pretty awful! But I have no way of confirming that, because the original track has all but disappeared from the Internet. In its place are dozens of TikToks with 100K+ views each, the first of which is titled "POV: You're overstimulated at H&M."5 The main thing that connects this no-longer-existent song to certified existent chart success "Mad at Disney," discredited pop-punkers Tramp Stamps, and superstar Charli XCX is that a bunch of people reacted to them on TikTok. The NBC piece is thus ephemeral thirdhand viral bait, chasing ephemeral secondhand viralbait, chasing viralbait whose ephemerality has reached its inevitable conclusion. The fact that the original viralbait involved music is incidental; the NBC piece might as well be about Bean Dad or Garden Wife or any of the "main characters" the Internet seizes upon daily. The Internet is clogged with tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of such ephemeral thirdhand viralbait pieces. But usually people know better than to elevate them to credible commentary on the State of Music Today.
- But hey! Pretty soon Congress will kill off TikTok, this problem will solve itself, and pundits will have to find another way that the kids are ruining everything.
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I generally like Vulture's pop culture writing, and I assume this title is tongue-in-cheek, but their recent headline "An All But Definitive Guide to the Hollywood Nepo-Verse" is kind of hilarious. I hope everyone got paid overtime for the amount of work it must have taken to list them all!
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This is where, for the approximately one millionth time, I quote glenn mcdonald, whose columns about pop music are still among the most essential music writing out there: "Maybe, locked in a cabin with an eight-track for two weeks, [Chantal Kreviazuk] would make a record that sounds just like this, and maybe she'd make one that consists of three twenty-five minute ambient polkas built entirely out of belching samples. Not only is the question unanswerable without resorting to (shudder) journalism, but because it can't be answered by inspecting the artwork, on one level it has to be irrelevant. If we can't tell whether these songs are individual catharsis or calculated commerce by listening to them, then we're asking a meaningless question. Either we find things to like, or we don't."
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When I was a teenager lurking on poetry boards, I quickly learned that the most dreaded phrase, the number one thing that got newbies bitten, were the words "I wrote it from the heart." These words almost always signaled that the poem you were about to read was the most awful, trite, craftless, banal piece of writing you'd encounter that week, until tomorrow rolled around and you'd read another poem that's almost indistinguishable.
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And this is where, for the approximately one millionth time, I quote Tom Ewing, whose writing about pop music on FreakyTrigger and then on Pitchfork is also essential: "Real-Fake records... include commodity pop and little else. The Real-Fake is public domain and ephemeral, which is only to say that the media forgets about it quickly. But the D.J.s remember, and so do the fans. Stick with a Real-Fake song long enough and you might end up its only friend, all its tawdry public meaning now yours and yours alone."
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Because of how TikTok's terrible UI works, the audio on these videos is titled "original song." This suggests that the writer was also writing this based on reaction videos alone.
