In the dizzying whirl of culture and technology, it can be easy to lose track of an eminently simple truth: more and more popular music today is purposefully funny. A brief jaunt through today’s top playlists and trending TikTok audios makes this clear: choruses with farty synth drops, meme-bait lyrics, concepts so absurd they beckon our ironic shares of them. What this trend reveals is not just that humor is curiously central in today’s music industry, but that there’s a specific type of humor that’s becoming more and more central as well. Funny music, if it’s the sort to go viral on TikTok, tends to veer towards the whoopee cushion rather than the comedic pontification. It’s usually funny in a boorish, absurd and caffeinated way.
The guiding critique of this newsletter, I suppose, revolves around the question of music and its purpose. Technology, namely streaming and recommendation algorithms, have turned music from an art form to instrument. Music today sets the vibe. It provides the backgrounds. Some of this is inherent in the form itself. Music is different than other art forms, say visual art or film, in the sense that listening can be done as a secondary activity. For example we can listen to music while cooking, but cannot advisably analyze a painting while doing so. Thus, there will always be a more diverse range of uses for music than other forms of expression. Background, vibe, tone-setting: go crazy culture, use it all. But what I have become concerned with is that streaming and algorithms have made the balance between thinking of music as an art form and a mere tool, disproportionate. In this context, music has become thought of by many as a pure vibe-setter, not a complex cultural product with meaning unto itself.
If turning music into a mood has been the domain (fault) of Spotify, then turning music into a joke has been the clear work of TikTok. And look, I love TikTok. Most of you who are reading this are probably doing so because you found me there. But its utility and addictive quality is also its dangerous side-effect. Going on TikTok is like turning up the saturation of life. It’s like railing caffeine pills and reading an Us Weekly, Reddit forum and watching CNN on 3x speed. In this dizzying array, the loudest, brashest, and most absurd piece of content makes the biggest splash.
This has meant some interesting developments for audio on the platform. TikTok knows better than any brand or company that listening is a secondary activity. On just about any video, you can disagregate the audio from its original context and use it for your own purposes. For example, a video of a woman saying “mmmm this is definitely fruity” in regards to a fresh candle has become a sonic meme used by thousands of users to indicate when someone/something seems gay. On TikTok, audio can become a meme, just as a visual gag, gimmick or symbol can become one on Instagram or Twitter.
Within this context, more and more music is either contorting itself to fit the incentives of funny TikTok audio, or is being re-purposed or marketed in a way that primes it for mass use on the platform. A few recent trending songs have put this dynamic in stark terms.
One is the rising popularity of BIZCOHCITO by Spanish pop superstar Rosalía. Now I am on record as LOVING Rosalía latest album “MOTOMAMI.” In many ways, the album takes the risks necessary to disentangle itself from Spotify’s overbearing music-as-vibes atmosphere. It’s hard, disjointed, playful and varied. And one of the peaks of its varied approach is BIZCOHCITO, an under-2-minute hyper-sped sprint that’s equal parts bratty and joyful. Rosalía, on tour and in videos, has perfected a masterful performance with the song. She begins by slumping to the side, uninterested and rude, with a hand on her hip as she chews imaginary gum. The dance that transpires after is ironic, wild, childish as she flops around like some wiggly sort of jump rope. This dance has made the song go extremely viral, but its the combination of the kooky, hyperfied sonics and her disafeccted gum-chewing stance that has turned the song into a true viral joke. Thousands of TikTokers have used the song and the general whatever-vibe of her pose to express their own ideas. And largely because of this, the song is currently her most popular song off MOTOMAMI according to Spotify.
Another song that set off my thinking is the meow-core EDM track Cbat by Hudson Mohawk. The song was released in 2011 but has seen a wild surge in popularity in the past week. It currently sits atop Spotify’s Viral 50 playlist. In a wild turn of events that can only be possible on the dizzying web, Cbat has re-entered the cultural lexicon because a reddit user made a viral TikTok about how he prefers to have sex to Cbat because he can mirror its rhythm. Now, a quick listen to the track, which centers around a synthesized cat meow moving in a strange, off-kilter see-saw rhythm and melody, will instantly give one the sense of why this is insane and prime fodder for internet- intrigue. And it helps that this obviously funny story is paired with a song so silly and stupid. Mohawke is definitely a legend, but his earlier trap-EDM had the potential to border on the campy absurdism that was early 2010s rave EDM. Cbat is not his best. But now, this old song and its re-contextualization in this absurd schema, will make it so it may become one of Mohawke’s most lucrative.
What both Mohawke’s Cbat and Rosalía’s BIZCOHCITO share is a silly garishness. A humor that suits itself to the ham-handed mode of internet jokes. The fact that these two, truly genius artists are seeing some of their biggest success through sort of musical gags strikes me as a stark example of the strange incentives of music in the attention economy. Though I’ve spilled much ink on the ways in which Spotify, TikTok, etc. have encouraged musicians to make music that suits the background/sets the vibe, I realize that TikTok in particular is creating an alternative, almost-contradictory incentive. These two songs are not music as vibes. They are, rather, music as vibe killers. Insane, distracting, wacky pieces of sonic splatter paint that maybe don’t work as background, but surely do as a meme-audio for TikTok.
Now just as music-as-vibes is not an inherently bad thing, music-as-gag is not either. But like vibes, when the incentive to make them becomes overbearingly alluring, we end up in a cultural ecosystems whose underlying workings are out of balance. Because if making a meme or making a vibe are the two tickets to streaming success right now, then we have found ourselves in a strange bi-polar reality. Either slip on the musical banana peel or become a spa soundtrack.
And you know, I’ll take option 3, whatever that may be.