The Uneasy Influence of TikTok (Sped Up Version)
/
Let’s talk about TikTok.
The video-based social media app launched in 2016 but grew explosively and unexpectedly during 2020 when none of us had anything better to do than stay inside and stare at our phones. As social media networks tend to do, TikTok went from a semi-niche video repository to a necessity almost overnight. Brands flocked to the platform peddling their wares, influencers made accounts hoping to be the next social media star, and creatives begrudgingly scooped up their @’s on the off chance that their promotional efforts paid off.
Over the course of the last five years, TikTok has had an increasingly influential hand in the music industry and culture at large. The platform was initially designed around music, specifically goofy mouth-alongs and a unique duet feature called “stitching,” which relied on a split-screen retweet-type feature between two different accounts. If you’re on the app, none of this is revelatory, I just need to give some background info for anyone over 25 who happens to click on this article.
Over time, TikTok became less focused on music and now hosts a wide range of content on everything from cooking instructionals and comedy skits to whatever the hell this is. There are a few people dedicated to documenting the unique brand of insanity happening on TikTok (shoutout to @coldhealing on Twitter), but that’s mostly a discussion for another day. As with any social media platform, some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, and some of it is actively smothering your brain cells in a wash of flashy colors and vaguely horny brain rot.
But this is a music blog, so let’s talk about that.
The first time I noticed the influence of TikTok on music was a relatively positive example. Chicago indie rocker Lili Trifilio (aka Beach Bunny) had just released her 2018 EP Prom Queen and unknowingly tapped into a rich vein. Over the course of 2019, thousands of users deployed the EP’s title track in their videos, using the song’s talky intro as a way to criticize diet culture and embrace self-love. It was all very good-natured and communal; a positive message was being spread, and a talented, hard-working band was able to reach new listeners as a result. Beach Bunny had officially experienced the TikTok boost, just don’t call them a TikTok band.
As an increasing number of TikToks featured “Prom Queen,” the song itself slowly began to garner hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify. This phenomenon rocketed Beach Bunny from a modest emo-adjacent DIY act to a fully-fledged indie rock success story. Over the next 1.5 years, the band went from opening for bands like Remo Drive and Field Medic to headlining nationwide tours of their own. The pandemic threw a wrench in things for 2020’s stellar Honeymoon, but that didn’t stop me from loving the album or stop the band from landing another megahit with “Cloud 9.” That song has since received a Tegan and Sara remix and now sits at just a few million streams behind the band’s first hit. Success begat more success, and at the time of writing, Beach Bunny currently has 6,704,409 monthly listeners on Spotify. Not bad for a band that started with Garageband recordings, shitty drums, and Audiotree performances.
Fast forward a few years, and TikTok’s influence on popular music has become much more complex.
TikTok, combined with the pandemic, essentially acted as an incubator for artists. We went into 2020 with a completely different set of stars than we have now, some of whom rose to prominence primarily because of their success on that platform. Olivia Rodrigo, PinkPantheress, Girl in Red, the success stories go on forever, even if some of them wind up just being a flash in the pan. Sometimes a song catches fire by design; other times, an obscure track gets a second wind thanks to some random gust of social media magic.
One of my favorite examples of algorithmic lightning striking is Pavement’s “Harness Your Hopes,” a relatively deep B-side that took on a life of its own midway through 2020. This song’s success led the band to reunite, tour, and film a brand new video for their decades-old viral hit. Just last year, the 90s slacker rockers opened their own museum, dropped a line of pierogies, and opened a broadway musical. As much as I hate to admit it, you gotta give credit where credit’s due: thank you, TikTok.
The examples are as countless as they are random. Long-hiatused emo legends Modern Baseball experienced a similar lift with “Tears Over Beers,” a song that has been rocking the ears of emo fans for 11 years at this point but now has a new lease on life thanks to Jake Ewald’s ultra-relatable lyricism. A TikTok search for the track will result in an endless scroll of dejected teens wallowing towards the camera as the lyric “he needed more than me” articulates their unrequited feelings to a tee. At the time of writing, “Tears Over Beers” is the most popular song on Modern Baseball’s Spotify, with about half as many streams as the genre-defining hit “Your Graduation.”
A case like “Tears Over Beers” is funny because relating to lyrics like those is what made Modern Baseball a success in the first place. Back in the day, the group’s charismatic songs led to millions of Tumblr posts, record sales, and shitty stick-and-poke tattoos. Now a new generation of teens is discovering comfort in the exact same words over a decade later. In a way, it’s weirdly affirming. On the other hand, it makes me feel old as fuck.
Sometimes all it takes is one relatable lyric for a song to become a TikTok hit. At some point, it doesn’t matter what the genre is or how abrasive the snippet might sound; if a big enough audience finds relatability in your words, they just might glom onto them and make you a star. As pointed out by Endless Scroll host Miranda Reinert, in most of these cases, the lyrics are essentially just musical captions meant for the user to say, “this is how I’m feeling now.” Other times, the audio of a TikTok can soundtrack more literal trends that people want to participate in. Sometimes they’re just funny and stupid, and we grow to like the song by association and pure memery.
But how is this bad? If you ask some music fans, there’s a knee-jerk jokey reaction that “we should have gatekept harder.” I think this is unilaterally stupid. You can’t be mad that Turnstile has reached a new stratum of popularity and is selling out theaters just because a new audience has found them. Discovering a band five years earlier than a Gen Z-er on TikTok doesn’t make you any cooler or make your fandom any more valid. If anything, you should be happy a band you’ve liked for so long is finding success and can keep doing what they love. If you’re a fan, you should welcome more fans and find comfort in having more people to share this art with. If you are into a band for the “cred,” you’re even more of a cornball poser than the kids you’re trying to make fun of.
Sure, it’s bizarre to see a rush of new fans change the makeup of an artist’s Spotify page in real-time, but you can’t change what’s popular any more than you can reverse the pull of the Earth. In some of these cases, I’m sure the new listenership is a welcome boost; a minor gust of wind in an artist’s sails that makes an otherwise untenable career path feel a little more rewarding and financially viable. In other cases, an artist might grow an accidental audience they need to coach (like Mitski) or outright reject (like MGMT). Again, these are separate topics already covered by other outlets, as you can tell by my excessive linking.
In all of the above examples, fans discover an artist and bring an expected result of increased listenership and musical patronage. TikTok or not, there’s always been a precedent for people finding a song and making an artist popular. What I’d like to talk about is the reverse, when artists react to that surge in a novel way. In the past few months, I’ve noticed an increasing trend of artists chasing TikTok success in a way that feels unartistic and utterly desperate. And that’s what I’m most interested in right now.
Let’s talk about GAYLE. She’s an 18-year-old artist from Plano, TX, who rocketed to stardom thanks to the TikTok-fueled success of her song “abcdefu.” GAYLE has a nose ring, loves eyeliner, and (according to her Spotify bio) claims that having split dye hair is a personality trait. As you could probably guess from the cleverly-named song title, “abcdefu” is a little bit edgier than the alphabet you might be familiar with. Just a glimpse into her dark reality.
I’ll admit I’m being a little bitchy, but GAYLE is definitively not for me; this is music by a teenage girl made for other teenage girls. I am out of my element, but it’s worth establishing this background information because “abcdefu” represents a microcosm of a very specific TikTok trend I want to discuss.
Musically, “abcdefu” is a breakup song. It’s Olivia Rodrigo for people who are only recently allowed to buy tickets to an R-rated movie but will still probably get carded. The song is meaner, more vindictive, and less nuanced than your average breakup track, but it undeniably captures some teenage bitterness that is bound to materialize in the wake of heartbreak from some dude with a Zoomer Perm. Lyrically, “abcdefu” comes out of the gates absolutely swinging with an angry list of things that GAYLE has obviously become fed up with.
Fuck you and your mom and your sister and your job
And your broke-ass car and that shit you call art
Fuck you and your friends that I'll never see again
Everybody but your dog, you can all fuck off
The song hinges on a beat where our heroine sings, “I was into you, but I'm over it now / And I was tryin' to be nice / but nothing's getting through, so let me spell it out: A-B-C-D-E, F U!” While it’s not exactly subtle, that line is a pretty cute payoff that then segues right back to the same list of grievances that opens the song. It’s easy to see why millions of teenage girls would find some catharsis in this song and make it a success almost single-handedly through TikTok.
As a fun/cursed side note, the success of “abcdefu” led to a whole cottage industry of artists making angry “edgy” music based on interpolating children’s songs. One of my favorite examples is Leah Kate, a 30-year-old whose recent hit song revolves around a chorus of “twinkle twinkle little bitch” and contains about as much nuance as you would expect after an opening lyric like that. There’s a whole crop of artists like this, and I can’t wait to see what other children’s songs they try to make a perverse version out of next.
At the time of writing, GAYLE has 12.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and her hit song has garnered over 888 million streams. She is also set to open for Taylor Swift on a leg of her upcoming Eras Tour. Honestly? Good For her.
What I’m most interested in about GAYLE isn’t her look, or her lyricism, or her rise to fame; it’s how many times she’s released different versions of the same song. A search for “abcdefu” on Spotify will result in no fewer than seven versions of the track.
There’s “abcdefu,” the original song
“abc (nicer),” the clean version
“abcdefu (demo),” which is self-explanatory
“abcdefu (chill),” for all your mellow kick-backs
“abcdefu (angrier),” for when you’re extra pissed off
And finally, “abc (The Wild Mix)”
Jesus Christ.
Collectively, these songs add up to a shocking 19 minutes and 42 seconds, about as long as your favorite Joyce Manor album or fifth-wave folk punk release. I personally think it’s hilarious to release a song this many times; it’s the logical extension of Lil Nas X gaming the Billboard Numbers with endless remixes back in 2019, the difference being we were all kind of rooting for Lil Nas X because that was still a semi-original idea at the time.
To a certain extent, you can’t fault GAYLE for trying. If there’s an audience for a slower version of your hit song, why not release it? If people want to film even angrier TikToks to an even angrier version of your song, why not give it to them? If your music’s good enough, I don’t see any reason not to make a bunch of different versions of it, but it has to stop somewhere.
Okay, different tonal versions are one thing, but now let’s talk about a separate (but related) phenomenon: sped-up versions of songs.
This is exactly what it sounds like: a sped-up version of a song complete with pitched-up Alvin and The Chipmunks vocals and an uncanny warble. It’s like listening to a podcast on 1.5 speed, but for music. Seeing a song tacked with “sped up version” is rapid-fire attention-deficit consumption carried out to its logical extreme. In most cases, a song will get sped up within TikTok using the platform’s native editing tools. Once the sound is up on the app, any user can pull the audio to put it over a video of their own, and once enough people do, a trend is born!
I’ll admit that sometimes the sped-up version of a song captures the energy of a TikTok well, especially if it’s just a surface-level shitpost. At best, a sped-up track can be an off-kilter jolt that catches you by surprise and adds to the unique assemblage of pop culture that makes a meme funny. What baffles me is artists embracing this trend by releasing sped-up versions of their own songs.
Last week, SZA released a sped-up version of “Kill Bill,” the breakaway hit off her long-awaited second studio album SOS. This is nothing against SZA, she’s far from the first artist to embrace this tactic; Lana Del Rey, Steve Lacy, and Madonna have all dipped their toes into the waters of officially-sanctioned sped-up songs over the last year. The sped-up phenomenon has come for pop hits such as “Sweater Weather” and Taylor Swift’s “Anti Hero,” just to name a couple random examples. Often this will result in runoff streams and success for the original song, so it’s easy to see this trend as an artist and think, “why not release this officially and get some streams?”
Despite the thousands of words that preceded this, I’m not inherently anti-sped-up songs, I mainly want to document this phenomenon as it stands at the onset of 2023 because I don’t think it’s even closer to over.
I do think artists run the risk of diluting their brand or appearing desperate, but those are all optics and (to some extent) subjective. This phenomenon is mainly relegated to pop music, where these artists are overtly chasing numerical success on the Billboard charts. If TikTok can grab them more streams, that’s great. If releasing a slightly different version of a song gets them more plays, why not? I get the logic.
Based on recent sentiments I’ve seen online, it seems like public opinion is turning away from this phenomenon. Aside from screwing with the musicality of your original song, seeing “(sped up version)” can make a music listener feel exploited. It’s almost like a reminder that the artist is doing this for plays, and you’re only there to tick another number onto the stream count. Actually, it’s worse than that. The artist is not releasing a sped-up version of a song for plays; they’re releasing it for a very specific purpose on a separate platform entirely. Despite existing on Spotify, the sped-up renditions feel like a version of the song that you shouldn’t actively be listening to. Listening to a pop song is one thing; listening to a sped-up version of a pop song is some psychotic shit.
It’s worth reiterating that I’m not “against” sped-up versions of songs, I just don’t want them to start clogging up streaming services under the guise of “new” music. There’s obviously enough money here that major artists are jumping on board, but seeing how people iterate on their own songs for the sake of streams is fascinating. Whether it’s recording the same song in different moods like GAYLE, speeding things up like SZA, or just releasing endless remixes, part of me can’t wait to see what other hair-brained schemes pop artists will use to gamify their music sales.
TikTok has brought this upon all of us, and for the time being, I’m just grateful these trends are mostly relegated to one specific (albeit very popular) genre. The problem is what happens in pop sometimes trickles down to other types of music. After all, it’s popular because it works, right? Whether this trend becomes fruitful enough to spread out to different genres of music remains to be seen, though a quarter million views on “Tears Over Beers {sped up}” signals something worrying to my brain.
Fans can only take what an artist gives us. If a musician releases things that they think their fans will want, that relationship works beautifully. I’d argue the best music is made by artists creating for themselves, making songs that they feel must exist regardless of how they’ll be received. Pop music already has an inherently commercial bent, but if musicians start actively chasing things because an algorithm says they’re popular, then we’ve all lost the plot.
