What TikTok’s songs of the summer tell us about our music habits
With no Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, or Taylor Swift accounted for, what is most telling about this year’s TikTok list is the growing disconnect it exposes between online trends and actual cultural impact. Thank God for that, writes Mark Beaumont
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Your support makes all the difference.Whatever sort of summer you’ve had in recent years – Brat, Hot Girl or, in my case, Knackered Dad – chances are it was because TikTok told you to. Long gone are the days when some sadistic breakfast show DJ might force a “Saturday Night”, “Agadoo” or “Gangnam Style” upon the country’s Balearic holidaymakers. When conniving tiki bar managers might make a “Shape of You” or “Despacito” globally ubiquitous from May to September. Or when Twitter/X shares might make peak season stars of Bruno Mars, Pharrell Williams or Robin Thicke.
Today’s big summer songs are instead decided by a six-second clip, a trend-friendly lyrical snippet and its suitability for showing off one’s lunch, handbag, dance move, or buttock fillers.
This week TikTok released its list of the biggest summer hits on the platform and it made for revealing reading, as much for what wasn’t included as what was. There’s been lots of talk of 2024 being a Brat summer, despite nobody really being able to define the vaguely rebellious rules: mine, I was told, began when I intentionally topped up the dregs of one pint with a half of a completely different brand lager, an action which, by total chance, also brought sexy back. Yet Charli XCX, whose Brat album mothered the idea, was nowhere to be found on the chart. Neither was Taylor Swift, despite her record-shattering Eras tour filling every tube carriage I’ve been on since June with sequins and friendship bracelets.
Nu-Taylor Sabrina Carpenter is represented twice in the top 10, but doesn’t top the TikTok charts despite her “Espresso” phenomenon suggesting she would. Instead, these are songs in unchallenging and unobtrusive styles – R&B, rap, country pop, electro-funk – but with one succinct slogan lyric that crystallises a specific mood, brag, emotion or challenge.
Topping the global chart is “Gata Only” by FloyyMenor and Cris MJ, two Chilean wannabe gangstas who, in the video, dance around the infinity pool of a hillside villa that looks so unlived-in you presume they’ve just snuck up the hill avoiding security drones while the exiled Mexican cartel kingpin who actually lives there is doing a five-year stretch. Their standard reggaeton song, when translated, reads like a DM thread from a pushy Hinge stalker: “Send me your location” and “Give me a chance to grind on you”, sing this pair of Gen Z Bryan Ferrys. But it also crucially includes the line “move your a** to the rhythm of the TikTok”. Yes, global superstardom really is that easy now.
On the UK list, a 2011 track from Blood Orange is No 2 – not, you presume, because of its cool synthetic art-funk textures but because it includes the line “come into my bedroom”, which is far easier for carpet-bombing TikTok users to deploy en masse than any sort of seductive charm and wit. Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby”, ringing in at No 3, is a by-rote electro-rap brag track whose hook line “I’m a million dollar baby” is perfect for that casual bling-flashing clip.
Top of the list is Tinashe’s “Nasty”, a kind of Megan Thee Stallion-lite R&B tune in that it plays up to the male rap fantasy of the sexually voracious (but coyly ashamed of it) woman telling men that their half-hearted bedroom manoeuvres are the stuff of Poldark’s OnlyFans. It’s a catchy track, but with one golden goose line: “Is somebody gonna match my freak?”
Now, Tinashe’s freak involves so much hip-shaking that I’m still in traction after my attempt at matching it, but TikTok loves picking up this kind of gauntlet. Last year some Wag overlaid the line onto an earlier video of a bespectacled man called Nate Di Winer winding his stuff while biting his finger; the clip garnered over 13 million views and sparked a global TikTok dance trend. Janet Jackson and Christina Aguilera were among the millions of people having a crack at matching Tinashe’s freak. The song was even placed over footage of King Charles unveiling his royal portrait.
Ker-ching, right? Actually, not so much. What’s telling about TikTok’s 2024 summer song list is the growing disconnect it exposes between online trends and actual cultural impact. Dave and Central Cee’s “Sprinter”, which topped TikTok’s list last year, spent 10 weeks at No 1, sold 1.2 million copies and cemented both acts’ positions at the top of the rap tree. “Nasty”, on the other hand, limped to No 66 in the UK chart and 61 in the US, and it’s by no means as unavoidable outside your local Tiger Tiger as previous summer songs like “Happy” or “Despacito”.
Has online music consumption, then, reached its Promethean moment? That first evolutionary point where its purpose divides into differing threads of enjoyment and display? Generation TikTok appears to have developed a scent for the perfect sonic meme. Not a song you’d necessarily go out of your way to dance to, watch performed in concert or buy a T-shirt for, but ideal to soundtrack a three-second online laugh, and then forget about the second the next trending lyric comes along that they can sing to their cat.
Why? Perhaps Gen Z has been fooled by a trending TikTok artist too often, elevating them to arena and festival status only to find they’re about as enjoyable over an hour live as apple-bobbing in British river water. The industry is catching on. This year Reading and Leeds, which has been known to fall for streaming-number hype far too easily, is putting electro-grime act LeoStayTrill on first on its second stage, hardly expecting his D Block Europe-esque “Pink Lemonade (Str8 Reload)” to own the weekend, despite being No 4 on this year’s TikTok list.
Or maybe the inrush of industry pushers trying to break their acts on the site, for lack of any other ideas, overloaded users who just wanted to shake their butts at the world without being molested by slavering commercialism. “When marketers and publicists realised that TikTok was their best hope for attention, they swarmed,” wrote New York Times critic Jon Caramanica earlier this year, “turning the app into a conventional promotional dust bowl.”
Whatever the reason for its waning power, it’s a welcome development. For all its influence in helping break Lil Nas X, Doja Cat or PinkPantheress, TikTok was never really about discovering and promoting interesting, boundary-pushing and music-altering acts, or even giving us a genuine feel-good hit of any particular summer. It promotes already familiar styles of music as a throwaway background commodity, irrespective of the overall quality of an act’s work, driving us deeper into an inescapable furrow.
Let us pray that the slip of TikTok’s foot on the cultural windpipe gives us fewer conveyor-belt flashes in the pan and more worthwhile acts get a chance to breathe.
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