Pen-banging crooners and songs about broccoli: TikTok’s outlandish take on pop
The means by which music is played invariably affects music itself: jazz changed with the introduction of the LP, which allowed longer pieces to be released; the arrival of the CD gave the world the blockbuster 70-minute hiphop album padded out with skits; a couple of years ago, a famous pop producer told me that the algorithms of Spotify now affect everything from a single’s length to the sound of its intro and choruses.
So it is with TikTok, seemingly the primary means by which tweens and teenagers discover music in 2021. There have been pop singles audibly designed to become memes on the video-sharing platform, Drake’s Toosie Slide and Justin Bieber’s Yummy among them. More intriguing is the way it has democratised music, taking it away from the machinations of record companies and placing its promotion into the hands of ordinary people, with often unpredictable results.
As anyone with kids who use TikTok will attest, the stuff they start listening to after hearing it in the backgrounds of videos is bafflingly eclectic: my youngest daughter has variously expressed a liking for Rockwell’s 80s funk hit Somebody’s Watching Me, Tiny Tim’s Tiptoe Through the Tulips With Me, the oeuvre of Pitchfork-tipped singer-songwriter Mitski and Edith Piaf’s signature tune La Vie en Rose.
She also likes Mother Mother, who may represent the most dramatic example of TikTok’s ability to turn around an artist’s fortunes: they were a minor Canadian indie band until two tracks from their 2008 album O My Heart unaccountably went viral on TikTok last summer. One, Hay Loft, has now been streamed 223m times on Spotify: Mother Mother’s forthcoming European tour will see them playing the kind of venues unimaginable 18 months ago.
The question of whether it can break new artists is more thorny. The success of Pinkpantheress, a 20-yearold student whose scrappy short-form take on drum’n’bass has moved from TikTok to the charts, suggests so. However, randomly searching TikTok for original music yields a lot of stuff that’s clearly hugely popular there, yet has little purchase beyond.
There’s J Maya, a Harvard graduate and singer-songwriter whose niche seems about as niche as you can get. She writes synthy pop songs based around Greek mythology: Achilles Heel and Thanatos (End of Us). There’s Lubalin, who comes from Montreal, looks like a skinnier version of Dave Grohl, and specialises in a brand of musical comedy that involves “turning random internet drama into songs”: his 40-second bursts of piano balladry or Weeknd-ish electro-pop come with lyrics based on preposterous online arguments about broccoli casserole or how to see if you’re pregnant. They’re genuinely funny, some having been viewed more than 40m times on TikTok, but you struggle to imagine them leading to a lasting musical career.
Jeven Reliford has amassed 36.5m likes. He sings cover versions while banging pens on a table. Atlantic Records signed him, but his debut single – in a retro R&B style – seemed to vanish without trace. The TikTok video of it got a tiny fraction of the interest that his a cappella version of Fly Me to the Moon did, suggesting that if he wasn’t banging pens on a table, people weren’t that interested.
As with Pinkpantheress, you can hear the way both the restrictions of the TikTok video and the platform’s magpie approach to music have affected the sound of Bella Poarch, who seems to have pivoted to a music career after becoming huge on TikTok for “making adorable faces”. The two songs she’s released have barely touched the two-minute mark. They contain echoes of everything from showtunes to dubstep in the cutesy sound of Build a Bitch – but her name thus far ranks alongside a host of other TikTok celebrities who haven’t replicated anything like their online success in what you might call the outside world: Peach PRC, Tayler Holder and Lil Huddy, who deals in Auto-Tuned pop-punk.
You’re struck by the sense of a kind of hermetically sealed space, with its own standards and stars – and the feeling that the latter don’t really need to break out. The money you can earn by making adorable faces as a TikTok influencer is such that you wonder where the incentive is: their annual income can run into millions. It feels like an end in itself, rather than a stepping stone. For the moment, TikTok’s impact on pop is likely to be felt in more subtle ways than simply grooming stars.