TikTok has broken rap music
Musicians are changing their songs for viral success on TikTok. But it's infantilising rap music
At a recent show in Los Angeles, the rapper onstage made the crowd wiggle their fingers and “sit down, stand up, sit-stand, si-sta...” like a game of musical chairs, as bright cartoons coloured the stage. It smacked of a six year old’s birthday party rather than the sweaty, fleshy rout of LA’s live rap scene. The artist responsible for the jamboree was Philly rapper Tierra Whack, whose debut album Whack World is a perfect companion to TikTok, the app that’s currently taking Gen Z by storm, and which now seems to be changing the entire genre of rap music.
Known as musical.y in an earlier incarnation (which the New York Times referred to as “the youngest social network we’ve ever seen”), the app merged with Bytedance in 2018 to become the singing-dancing conglomerate that the world is now struggling to make sense of. It has upwards of 500 million active users, and every day, teens and tweens are uploading millions of fifteen-second videos of themselves lip-syncing to music.
TikTok also seems to be stripping music of any of its severity. “Even the really dark scary songs are all made out of fun; even the really serious songs aren’t taken seriously anymore,” says Llusion, a popular producer on the app who posts videos almost daily. "For some reason, our ears just absorb all the songs we hear on TikTok and they just get stuck in our heads and we fall in love with them.”
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