Hello, from The Goods newsletter twice a week! On Tuesdays, internet culture reporter Rebecca Jennings uses this space to update you on what’s happening in the world of TikTok. Is there anything you want to see more of? Less than? Different than? The e-mail [email protected]and subscribe to The Goods newsletter here.
A few months ago, when Spotify was showing each of its users its most popular songs and artists from 2020, I saw a meme that was made to look like someone’s most heard genre was “1800’s sea shacks”. I laughed and went over my story on Instagram, thinking, “’Favela do mar, ‘ now this is a term you don’t hear every day ”and I forgot.
That was, until two weeks ago, when a real marine slum appeared on my TikTok page “For you”. The video showed a man singing a song whose lyrics I could barely understand due to his strong Scottish accent, but he was definitely saying something about a ship and a coast. Another man added several lines of tenor and baritone to harmonize with the music. It sounded kind of intriguing, but my first thought was more like this is the dumbest thing i’ve ever seen and so it rolled past.
But, looking back, I should have known that this was exactly the kind of thing that the internet would go down on and cling to with more ferocity than a swashbuckling sailor holding an oar in a storm in the middle of the Atlantic. I should be able to imagine the tweet with literally hundreds of thousands of likes saying “SeaShantyTok is getting better and better” or declaring 2021 the “year of the sea slum”All because a video went viral on TikTok, which is hardly extraordinary on a platform where random videos are constantly going viral.
It should have been easy to imagine the breathtaking coverage that followed after the videos of the slums of the sea made the leap from TikTok to Twitter, where a much larger number of adult journalists consume news. Of course, all the sites were trying to explain why a random New Zealand sea slum called “Wellerman” suddenly got stuck in everyone’s head. “Marine shacks took over TikTok. Here’s why, ”wrote CNET. The New York Times intervened to correct us (in fact, they are “whale hunting songs”), while the New Yorker did what the New Yorker does best: spell words in a strange way (what the hell is “sea-chantey ? ”).
“Um, it makes perfect sense that we all like sea slums now,” said Vulture, the reason being “they are unifying and survival songs, designed to transform a large group of people into a collective body, all working together to keep the ship afloat. ”Few went so far as to raise a handful of TikToks to undeserved importance than the Washington Post, whose headline (certainly semi-ironic) was“ The shacks of the sea are here to save us ”.
I regret to inform you: they are not.
What happens with viral sea shacks is that there is literally nothing to explain. There is no need to frame the TikTok sea slum with our current political moment or pretend that there was something inevitable about the popularity of the sea slums in early January 2021.
You can replace the title “The sea shacks are here to save us” with literally any “exciting” trend that came out of TikTok last year. “The cranberry juice guy skateboarding for Fleetwood Mac is here to save us.” “This girl skating to the sound of ‘Jenny From the Block’ is here to save us.” “O Ratatouille musical is coming to save us, ”was a real December headline. Did any of these trends last beyond a few weeks? Of course not.
What is really happening is the convergence of various forces that are pushing niche content into an enormous amount of eyes. TikTok is full of unconventional subcultures, certainly more unconventional than any I have ever seen. Its algorithm uses trained AI to detect trend videos combined with – crucially – a hint of pure randomness, which means that sometimes these videos end up becoming massively viral.
The probable chain of events was this: someone saw a particularly captivating video of several people singing a sea slum and liked it, then it was shown to more people who also liked it, and then someone liked it enough to post it on Twitter, where made it even more viral because Twitter is the exact audience that would look at it and say, “Wow, the sea shacks are going viral on TikTok, how peculiar and uplifting!” So a lot of reporters like me saw it and knew it would be decent content on our sites, because readers and viewers like to watch things that are new, but also familiar, especially now, when our brains are exhausted from constant stimuli, but desperate for even more of that.
That is why phenomena like marine slums continue to happen continuously and none of that matters. Like Kyle Chayka and Taylor Lorenz discussed on Twitter, “The internet of the quarantine era only makes us move through obscure niches of culture faster and faster” and “It is a kind of idiotic and inconsequential / non-controversial piece of culture that everyone can write / talk about.” Baffler Editor Jess Bergman tweeted, ‘If I see another explainer about favelas of the sea in the video app for teenagers, I’m going to freak out. “
Of course, we are all people whose job it is to interpret the internet, but I feel that there is a certain fatigue happening also on the consumer side. When Elon Musk, the richest man in human history and a terminal sufferer of posted illness, tweeted about sea slums, he was then shrewdly compared to Denny’s Twitter account, killing memes in the 2010s. People get angry about these things. There is a lot of that.
It would be great if the sea shacks really saved us, wouldn’t it? But we know better now, because the Ratatouille musical didn’t save us, neither the skateboarder Fleetwood Mac nor anything in two weeks “everyone at TikTok is obsessed with!” (probably the Bridgerton musical). To avoid sounding like the biggest petty person in the world, I think it’s generally good to watch people discovering and enjoying something they wouldn’t otherwise have or collaborating with each other on the internet (the video where several people sing “All Star” by Smash Mouth in slum cadence it’s funny), but none of this is exclusive to the slums of the sea. This is how things work now.
I will leave you with the chorus of Wellerman’s music, which can be argued that it is also a metaphor for finding hope on the internet. Maybe one day, after we finish our job, things will get better and we can all get out of here.
Soon Wellerman will come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day when tonguin ‘is ready
Let’s say goodbye and go
TikTok in the news
One last thing
If you haven’t seen Rep. Christina Haswood, Kansas State’s TikTok, about herself preparing to be sworn in to the Kansas House of Representatives in traditional Navajo dress, I don’t know what to say to you, except watch if you want to feel joy!