For those interested, all Taylor Swift content is going behind the paywall, in Mean Girl Moment. If you’re tired of her, I’m sorry but if you can’t help yourself, subscribe now.
Beyonce’s Cowboy Hat
I feel like we’re not making enough noise about Beyonce’s Grammy’s look. Beyonce’s having fun! When you release house music, you’re free to do whatever you want and that means wearing a white cowboy hat for your own amusement. She looks great and it also makes me laugh a lot. Perhaps we’re wary of Beyonce memes as something that is a relic of the old internet. We don’t want to play with those toys anymore or we’ve forgotten how expressive and funny she is as part of her public persona but I think we’re wasting an opportunity. We’ve only really gotten traction with the image of Meryl and her Iron Lady grip on Queen Bey’s arm but I think we’re wasting the cowboy hat.
That’s Oomf
A meme that is simply reckoning with how we talk now. Let’s replace famous phrasing with our new verbiage in an attempt to cope with our new world. These tweets are not so much jokes as recognition of change and the passage of time. I’ve yet to see one that made me laugh or was unique from the 15 other versions on my feed. Yes “oomf” is hard to wrap your head around as part of our new vernacular but if this is what makes it easier for you, please speed up the process. It’s not that difficult a world to live in once you understand the fun of oomf and even oomfie. I’m sure Shakespeare will forgive us.
What Was The Incident At Your [x]
It’s amazing it took us this long to get creative with “What was the incident at your high school?”. Probably because we all secretly like this prompt. Everyone has a story where between 200 and 2000 teenagers were suddenly the Greek chorus in a scandal involving sex, death, or financial irresponsibility (and if you were lucky all three). Almost everyone’s is unique with various regional specialties so hard to pretend the site isn’t at least interesting when one of these prompts is popular. We can’t talk shit about this prompt openly because every time it goes around at least one person has a really good incident. We must have done it too recently or people have started telling boring ones because we only make fun of these prompts when we really can’t take it anymore. We need to bench this prompt for at least a year before we can gather ‘round the quote tweets and tell stories of incidents again.
TikTok
I’m going to issue a quick edict and say that we’re not doing “we’re blank of course we blank” anymore. There is no spin I appreciate. No Irony is true and no joke is worth it. If you didn’t think of one in December, there is nothing worthwhile to say in February. I need everyone to think of a new prompt. Please.
UMG Crack Down
Ok, huge news. Universal Music Group removed all their music from TikTok following a failure to negotiate a new licensing agreement. All the popular songs we loved are gone and all the videos featuring them have been muted. This is sad for a lot of people and leaves a gaping hole in existing content for the app. Many of us lost the soundtracks to our favorite edits. I’ve been saying edits are the only reason to be on the app anymore and this is a blow to many a creator. A lot of edits are now shadows of their former selves with nothing to show for them.
My favorite edits are safe though. My favorite edits are made by people with talent and taste. The ones I liked were not using the sounds provided by TikTok but existed as their own files, with music intact. Diegetic sound if you will. The SydCarmy bags edit that I watch once a week still exists because the sound is part of the whole video as it is uploaded to TikTok. I don’t know how all my favorite artists figured out how to avoid this crackdown but it feels like wisdom from the old internet, when we were still somewhat at war with copyright holders.
It does not make sense to trust websites whose main purpose is not music piracy, especially fancier more corporate ones (YouTube, Tumblr, Google) to keep our music on the site. If you’ve been around long enough to pirate music, you understand that it’s a push and pull between the general public who want to consume everything, the artists who make the music, and the corporations that license the songs. Everything that feels like a halfway point or a compromise always feels like a huge loss for people who just want to mess around with music. Remember 8tracks? The edits that still have their sound were created by people who know enough not to trust TikTok to provide music to them because they knew it could be taken away. If you want to create art on the internet that lasts you have to have control of all parts, otherwise it will be taken away from you. For late Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the UMG crackdown is a lesson in how to pirate and preserve your work.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Aside from the general loss, this could be TikTok’s time to shine. A lot of people have hope for the indie music scene on TikTok to explode, which is not something I am rooting for. The last thing the app needs is more indie musicians. This crackdown is the walls closing in. People are making interesting videos for the first time in months. There’s something worth talking about and everyone is putting something out there. It’s forcing everyone to be creative, more than just indie musicians who will take any excuse to whip out their guitar and ask for attention. The crackdown could be the beginning of an incredible era of TikTok creativity or the end of an app that was already dying.
2 Days Into College
Here is something creative and fun and funny. A Duke basketball player, Jared McCain sang a snippet of a song he found on TikTok. Now the player and the song have become inextricable from each other. Everything about him is also about the song and everything about the song is also about him. It makes sense that a college athlete active on TikTok would get an accidental theme song created by a fellow tiktoker. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship that raises both of their somewhat low profiles to a wider audience. Fans of the song will now have his high school highlight reel on their FYP and fans of the player have a fun little tune to groove out to. They’re the muppet babies version of Taylor and Travis. If nothing else a fun marketing tactic. Why shouldn’t TikTok singers get in on a part of that sweet NIL money?
Finally, a trend where the goal is to be funny and creative and think outside the box. A trend that requires narrative tension. To create a second iteration of the trend is to accept the premise of the first version you saw and build on it. One needs to understand the contract they enter when creating their own. They will create several slides that are boring predictions and then they will tell a story. They will craft a narrative that is unexpected and humorous. Perhaps fantastical. I believe there is no longer humor to be generated from relatable content on TikTok anymore. We cannot rely on our observations of the real world. We have to create new things and play with reality form and expectations. I do not want to be told what I already know to be true.