I’m thinking about Bob Dylan today. Not because of A Complete Unknown, or Timothée Chalamet’s continued cosplay, but because late last week, Dylan decided to join TikTok.
I’m thinking about how the 83-year-old is on borrowed time to craft a For You Page that speaks to his sensibilities, before the TikTok-ban hammer comes down on Sunday, January 19. I’m thinking about the Dayton, Ohio, mom or British teenager that Dylan, a generational songwriter and poet, is going to pause on for a second; witness their juddering dance moves to “Gas Pedal” or a sped-up Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons edit; and scroll past again. Will he comprehend the TikTok influencer vernacular? Will he feel “I smoke like a chimney, I’m not skinny, and I pull a Britney every other week” deep in his soul?
We’re on a bit of a reminisce kick for the songs that defined our extinguishing TikTok run. After launching in 2017, when videos had a 15-second limit to grab your attention, the short-form video app enjoyed a sharp rise in popularity during the pandemic, its addictive algorithm and endless scroll function changing how we engaged with and how we consume culture at large. It’s a little destabilizing to look back at the time when corporate offices’ HR departments were rallying employees to believe that dancing frenetically to “Savage” and “Say So” was a good remote extracurricular, or when a particularly intricate set of steps would land you a slot on Ellen.
And then, catering to users’ rapidly diminishing attention spans, a trend for sped-up songs arose: a high-pitched, double-speed version of Katy Perry’s “Wide Awake” is now at the top of my running playlist. But I’ve also discovered the sparkling back catalog of Italian ’60s pop group Ricchi E Poveri, whose glittering, nostalgic sounds were the soundtrack for every American girl’s “tomato girl summer” vacation diary.
To this day, TikTok has propelled musicians to stratospheric levels of fame thanks to its flash-in-the-pan viral sounds. Would “Million Dollar Baby” have its Grammy nomination—or would Charli XCX have banished “Apple” from the Brat tour setlist—otherwise? A young girl from Lafayette, Louisana, lipsynced her way to 88.5 million followers, and later, a juggernaut music career that’s yet to crest; and Sofia Richie Grainge surely set the soundtrack for weddings for the next century, with Stephen Sanchez’s “Until I Found You.” Curtis Waters went from working in a North Carolina smoothie bar to over one billion streams after “Stunnin’” stormed the app. And it hasn’t all been about looking forward: pop that swung at the mainstream and missed the first time around got a second go. Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” became a sleeper hit two years after its initial release, and TikTok buoyed the rise of Britain’s hard-grafting Raye with “Prada.” So, too, did TikTok lean into our era’s nostalgia-dominant pop culture, breathing life into long lost (or so Gen Z may think) classics from acts like Fleetwood Mac, Boney M., Billy Joel, and even Aly & AJ.
