philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Teens Are Making History on TikTok

On TikTok, you can find a delightful collection of DIY #history parodies set to hip hop, Soviet anthems, and Rick and Morty sound bytes, shot in dorm rooms on iPhones, with TikTok text stickies indicating the date and event. (TikTok is an app for teens in which users can pair up to 15 seconds of video to samples from pop music or self-recorded audio, which is common knowledge at the time of this writing, but given the lifespan of apps–R.I.P. Vine–I feel it necessary to explain.). Teens and twenty-somethings (mostly dudes) use the tools God gave them–Nerf guns, washcloths for wigs, a flashcard marked “HAT”–to depict bickering nations at war, colonial invasion, and institutional racism in America. (Costumes vary in realism, but a high-quality World War I uniform suffices just as well as a bedsheet for a Medieval shawl.) They’re often one-man shows, switching camera angles to signal different characters. They range from both hilariously weird one-liners to sobering commentary: in one, a 16th-century layman, voiced by Spongebob, shrieks against the backdrop of a Catholic church when Martin Luther, voiced by Patrick, interjects “I know: Let’s leave!” In the next, an African in 1400 is interrupted from his hunt when a series of European countries dance through the door to Lil Keed’s “It’s Up Freestyle.” The civil rights movement features prominently: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and John Lewis have a dance party in hoodies, and a guy labeled “white guy” walks in on Rosa Parks sitting on a chair in the bedroom to the lyric “get the fuck up.” (The caption is “Its a joke.”) Sometimes they’re off-color, like Anne Frank sneezing in a closet while a Nazi hunts for her downstairs. Sometimes they’re funny in the implicit acknowledgment that our forebears perished on the shores of Normandy so we can make TikToks about them from our bedrooms.

He added, surprisingly: “Obviously, the way things are now, someone’s going to get offended. But if they do, it’s their fault, because that’s history, and that’s the way things work.”

See the full story here: https://gizmodo.com/the-teens-are-making-history-on-tiktok-1839453860