Music's Mass Cringing

TikTok has made the unthinkable happen: musicians now are cringe

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One of the biggest songs on TikTok is a lullaby for anxious grown-up #weirdos.

The viral hit “If I were a fish” came to us initially via a TikTok by Tennessee-based (and Atlantic-signed) singer-song writer Corook.

In the video, Corook, full of lively whimsy and adorned with a silly-goofy frog hat, stares into the smiling eyes of her partner, Olivia, as they both croon the cheerful tune. According to the caption, the couple wrote the song in 10-minutes during a day when Corook was feeling “very emotional . . . insecure and out place.” The song, she offers, is about “the joy of being different.”

“If I were a fish and you caught me/ I’d say look at that fish, shimmering in the sun,” they begin, singing with the yelpy inflection of a hopped-up Kimiya Dawson before landing on a chorus of sorts: “Why is everyone on the internet so mean?” they ask. “Why is everyone on the internet so afraid of what they’ve never seen?”

We don’t have the time though to ponder such a query. We quickly move to a triumphant resolution: “If I was scrolling through and I saw me/flopping around and singing my song/I’d say hey they’re cute and sing along,” they end, wrapping the carol up with big and gorgeous smiles.

“Why is everyone on the internet so afraid of what they’ve never seen?”

It’s surely a valid point. But in this case, I have “seen” this sort of video many, many times. And the fact that I have witnessed the wild success of this kind of song repeatedly — songs that are straight-forward, prescriptive, childish frankly — signals to me that the song’s success is not so much a testament to its status as a brave antidote to a cruel internet culture, but rather a clear display of how musicians have been encouraged to belittle their art form for fleeting TikTok attention. If this is the kind of song, the kind of content, that assuredly does well on the TikTok, I think we can say that something is happening to music and musicians on the platform.

TikTok, I fear, has made musicians cringe.

I started ruminating on this this weekend when I, like many others, was thinking about Frank. This was before we knew anything of his sad, maybe disastrous Coachella performance. Before that, I was thinking about the man and I was thinking about the fish song and it sort of hit me that something big has shifted.

Frank Ocean was the first artist I ever obsessed over. I bought Channel Orange on iTunes in middle school and listened to it so intently that I wore out the wire of my then graying ear buds. And I scoured the internet on a laptop I shared with my sister to find factoids about the elusive artist. I found mixtapes on strange websites and battled pornographic pop-up ads to hear discarded demos. I read, with revelry, his Tumblr post alluding to a vague yet tender male lover (well, I read that for other reason too). I sought images and stories and lore. I engaged, fervently, with his mystery.

I was, to be clear, 12, so much of this hazy nostalgia is filtered through a child’s lack of media literacy. But it’s also filtered through the joy of a child’s first somersault into the world of culture: that first album you find that opens up a world. I think though, by all accounts, we can say that Frank Ocean was cool. And this coolness was inextricably linked to his unknowability. Frank is famously not active on social media. When his private Instagram account was made public, there was a ravenous move by his fans to scour the posts for a peak inside his cave. The trivial nature of the posts — his friends, his home, him singing — felt like hit of good liquor. Potent. I had never seen him as he was. A man inside the world.

Considering Frank and his once-mystery now, I am forced though to wonder: Could Frank Ocean become Frank Ocean today? By that I mean, could an artist rise to the stature that Frank Ocean eventually would while remaining concealed? In a time where success in music essentially depends on a steadfast commitment to posting, how can an artist today achieve both widespread notoriety while remaining discrete?

This question is relevant to the extent that Frank’s (or any artist’s) appeal is dependent on their continued discretion. There is no Frank Ocean without Frank, the enigma. And thus the improbability of a 2023 Frank bums me out. Because I think we lose something when we lose the potential for the rise of the mysterious artist.

this was a drug for me . . .

It’s undoubtable at this point that TikTok is the chief music discovery platform of our era. That is to say: if you’re an artist and you’re not on TikTok, it’s a definite choice.

My TikTok feed attests to this. It’s completely overrun by bumbling artists all trying in some way to get me to pre-save/listen to their song, or at the very least use their audio in a video.

There are a staggering amount of strategies for this and these strategies fall in and out of vogue, often rapidly.

There’s the made-up genre strategy, where a musician describes their music with a ludicrous new genre-title, the ridiculousness of which invites a flurry of comments, in turn boosting their video in the algorithm.

There’s the “hey I was just filming this” strategy, where an artist, fly-on-the-wall-style, films themself playing their song to their parents (or whoever) for the first time, inspiring understandable tears, which in turns inspires comments and also too, boosts the video in the algorithm.

There’s the long-text short video method (which I use to hock my Substack), where a musician plays their audio over a video with an inordinate amount of text, forcing a reading viewer to loop the clip. This also boosts the video in the algorithm.

And there’s the trauma dump strategy (TW: SA), where a musician details the trauma behind the writing of a particular song. The story, shocking and tragic, inspires discourse in the comments. And this discourse? Well, it boosts the video in the algorithm.

These are just a few examples of such strategies. And these can be done to varying degrees of earnestness and artifice. But the result of them all is a calculated increase in engagement that works to super-charge the spread of one’s music in an algorithmic network. This is not art, but marketing. And while it may bear fruit and is clearly a necessary facet of an artist’s life today, it does inherently expose the cards one’s holding.

You may be an “artist,” but here you are: openly selling your widgets.

WIERD

I always regarded musicians with a certain parasocial awe. I always felt like I both knew my favorite artists, but also too was far, far beneath them. I think that’s because artists impart a sense of both vulnerability and mystique. The lead singer of a rock band coos a diaristic free flow while lit with the bright shine of a spotlight. We feel like we know them, yet how could we? They’re all the way up there, on stage. Our best friend and our angel. Frank.

The “coolness” of music then resides in the ability of its practitioners to remain distant and elusive, even while connecting with us deeply. They make the music. We listen. We interpret. Then we feel. We don’t have all the info, but we do have the work. And that’s enough. Maybe we found them through a blog. Maybe through a friend. The radio. At a concert. But there was a process of discovery and uncovering. And there was a filter between us and them. As we engaged with the work, we interpreted it, in turn creating a mythos.

Some remove is crucial here. If this artist were selling their CD on the street and we bought it and listened, we may be pleasantly surprised to find that this lone vendor is actually making something pretty cool. But that fleeting and ordinary exchange also means that their product would read to us as just that: the merchandise of one bustling salesperson.

It seems then that the illusion that music is not a simple commodity is necessary to the upholding of its mystique. Music — invisible, affective, resonant and deep — comes to us and changes something often unnamable inside. That’s why an overeager disposition to selling music on the part of its creators will always feel a bit craven and cringe.

What do you mean “I should stream your song?”

I thought these sounds descended from the heavens to my ears?

Of course, music, in many crucial ways, does feel this way today: heavenly. Or at least from the cloud(s). And that’s the problem. Streaming with its infinitude and adaptability has given us the heightened illusion that music is not a product of labor, but divination. It appears for us to listen to whenever.

It’s that very fact of infinite choice though that has created a counterfactual. Today, artists must fight harder and harder for a small strip of land in the ever-expanding sonic galaxy. And they are forced to resort to ever more extreme forms of marketing. But because of this necessary act, music consumers are forced to reckon with, and in turn have shattered, the illusion of music’s heavenly creation. The artist, in their forthright marketing, reveals themselves as a seller of goods.

The tension between art and marketing, or art and commerce, is eternal; hence the mythic (and real) fight between the artist and their greedy label intent on shaping them for mass appeal. But when I scroll on TikTok, I get the unnerving sense that thousands of young musicians have become so accustomed to the strange rules of TikTok’s algorithmic logic, that they feel no need to grapple with these timeless questions. So many, it feels, are down to play the game.

And maybe the realities of the business are so tough that young artists don’t have the time or perspective to see their narrow entrapment. When there are 100,000 songs entering streaming platforms daily. When labels offer little in terms of artist development or marketing. It becomes the purview of artists to hock theirs wears and goods. But its a balancing act. Too aggressive of a TikTok strategy and you have deemed yourself a TikTok artist. Too little and you’re well, no one.

Of course, not every new artist aggressively markets on TikTok — though it’s the most obvious and clear strategy for success on the platform. Some can find TikTok notoriety by merely sharing their song in a simple video. That doesn’t mean though that their work is particularly laudable or deep. In fact, it may mean the opposite. If one’s song or “audio” is doing well on its own on TikTok, with no wider marketing push, it likely means that the song is brash and flashy enough to garner attention for its mere bombast or straightforwardness.

“If I were a fish” is a clear example of this. The song blew up on its own merit, but that merit rests on its syrupy sweet clarity. It hits you with its hammer. It works as a TikTok audio for this very reason.

Other examples of songs that have blown up via their supposed intrinsic strength are Lizzy Mcalpine’s “You Ruined the 1975” which is about a boy who, you guessed it, ruined the band the 1975 for her, and “Girls” by The Dare, which I like and have written about fondly, but that song too is deeply straight-forward. This means that yes, it works as an abrasive totalist bop, but it also means that the song works for TikTok and the platform’s cartoonish affect.

In this sense, TikTok has cornered all artists seeking to reach some sort of mainstream reach. You either brazenly self-promote, and destroy your mystique, or you make music that simply works on TikTok, which is to say music that speaks down to its audience.

All of this has led to a strange and sad result. Today, when I think of a rising artist, I no longer think of the platonic image of the lone musician singing on a dimly lit small stage committed to their craft despite the difficult path ahead. Instead, I think of a bumbling singer on TikTok, begging me to pre-save their single.

No more noble than an influencer selling CBD gummies. Bummer.

things have gotten so deeply horrible and bad

The worst fight I ever had with a romantic partner was on the concept of cringe.

We both were haters at heart, but he was admittedly more brazen. When I say haters, I mean we both viewed culture with a critical, exacting lens. My challenge with hating though was that I am, after all, a try-hard, and every time I felt us moving into the rush of honing in on why something sucks, a strange pang of guilty empathy would kick in. The artist (be they a director, musician, or social media creator) was, after all, putting themselves out there. And as a musician and writer and person actively and publicly putting out my work, I can relate to anyone releasing their work into the cruel void.

So one evening, while were edging towards a discursive and critical peak, I wimped away from our collective point.

“Look,” I said, “I feel like we’re always cringing at people. And I feel like cringe, as an emotion, is a negative thing to give into.”

I had been thinking about this a lot recently and was definitely heavily influenced by the YouTuber Contrapoints, who had recently released a video on the topic.

“We cringe at what’s familiar,” I offered. “Like we cringe at annoying tenderqueers, right?” Most of our ire at the time was focused on the politics of young queer people who had developed a particularly moralistic, almost conservative politics. “But we focus on them and cringe because they are close to us. We were recently like them, but we’re not anymore, so they annoy us even more. They reflect our self-hate. Or the hate of our recent selves.”

This, he took, as a cop out: a chance to both participate in a bitchy critique sesh with him while making it clear that I was too good to hate all the way.

“I guess you win the good person competition!” he spat.

That pissed me all the way off. We yelled at each other for another hour, on increasingly personal themes.

This is all to say, I don’t take particular pleasure in deeming things cringe. I have long defended mega-pop. I have, in fact, deemed myself a poptomist. I am not one to admonish something for being overly-commercial or trite. I find beauty in the plastic.

And I still do relate to those putting themselves out there. You are reading this because I myself have done so. The push and pull between art and marketing is perennial, and necessary. But when I go on TikTok and see so much of what’s doing well on the platform, as well as the lengths musicians are forced to go to publicize their work, I do cringe.

My ex, during our fight, told me: “You’re being ridiculous. We cringe because something’s bad.”

And you know what? Maybe the truth is somewhere between my point and his. I do relate to the striving artist who sacrifices purity to reach an audience. But I cringe at TikTok musicians because they are doing so at the extreme expense to their artistry.

With their constant and over-the-top their marketing, they make no room for mystery. No mystique. No room for us to love them as I once loved Frank. They hit us with their sledgehammer and then boom-honk out an air horn sound effect. This is not craft but Gen Z cringey bombast. This is not craft but 2020s circus-shit.

And it would be one thing if this TikTok behavior was at the mere expense of individual artists and their work, but as this behavior becomes hegemonic, consumers are inadvertently taught to care less for craft. To regard music less as art than attentional commodity. When one only see musicians as clownish salespeople hocking their wares on the digital marketplace, why would they ever view musicians as artists dedicated to any form of pure expression? If musicians even don’t care about the purity of their form then why should we?

Everything fades then to mediocrity.

At a certain point, those of us that care, will have to collect ourselves and name what’s good and not. And to name this underlying dynamic that’s encouraging so many potentially good artists to lessen the value of their own output, be it by making bullshit or bullshitting daily with TikTok algo-hacks. This is not to say that any one artist alone can escape this dynamic — the algorithmic context that led to this feels entrenched — but if we can name it, we can shame it, and then maybe, hopefully, we can stop it. Because I miss my god damned mystqiue. I miss . . . Frank.

“Why is everyone the internet so mean?”

Maybe, it would help, if in some ways we’re all just a little bit meaner.

OOP

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Also: I’d love to know, firsthand, how you (the manager, the artist, A&R, the Spotify employee) are dealing with the algorithmic mind melt. Reach out: My email is tobiehess@gmail.com