🎵 Top Sounds 🎵
Our curated picks of the top sounds on TikTok
It’s time to show the world who copied you! Think of this as the TikTok trend equivalent of someone at a party retelling the joke you just told them.
This song didn’t come out in 2008-2009 but to me, this song is peak recession core. Perhaps it’s fitting then, that the sound is accompanying more mawkish videos.
That’s An Apartment Not A House 🤨
The TikTok sound equivalent of this meme. This sound practically doubles as an argument against landlords, or at least as an argument against mojo dojo casa house furnishings.
It’s all about perseverance. This sound celebrates and pokes fun at the effort to do so.
For the weird friends, and the friends who simply want a LinkedIn skill endorsement.
🔉 Our Sound Highlight 🔉
Women Are My Favorite Guy
Mood: 😎
A TikTok parody song became a genuine bop. It’s a spot-on parody of late 90’s Euro dance music. Listening to this song makes me feel like I’m back in my grandparent’s house watching early 2000’s Eurovision. The virality even led to (faux) controversy in the style of late 90’s groups.
👹 Effects Highlight 👹
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He said KNUCK if you BUCK. The folding chair has become a symbol this past week hence the “which folding chair are you?” filter.
“Let me live” is a phrase I’m sure a lot of us say on the regular. This CapCut template is great for scenarios when you just want to be left alone.
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I actually do not believe the Dept. of Education needs blocks from me but I’m very down for throwing blocks until my student debt is erased.
🗣️ The Moment 🗣️
Issues that are at the forefront of online discourse— Ancestral Brawl
We’re living through history.
Call it what you will: The Battle of Montgomery, The Super Brawl MDCXIX, Avengers: Chair-Game. It wasn’t just a fight that went viral. No no, it was so much more.
The events went roughly as follows: a group of white people blocked a riverboat from docking, a Black employee tried to remedy the situation, and the group of white people attacked him. A sixteen-year-old coworker swam to help fight off the group, and countless strangers ran to his defense. Finally, somebody’s uncle turned up wielding a folding chair like an ancient katana. Now multiple angles of the fight are up online with endless wild details, memes, and even the mayor weighing in.
Now, when I say history, I mean history. Because honestly what possesses a person to believe they are so entitled to space that they leap to violence? And what does it say that the victim of this group was a sole Black man?
Let’s consider the history of the place the brawl happened. The Montgomery Dock was the entry point of enslaved people in Alabama. The road up to that dock was the road enslaved people would be forced down on the way to the Montgomery Slave Market. The Big Harriott itself, the boat the group wouldn’t let dock, is a 19th-century vessel, active at the height of the slave trade in Montgomery. Oh, and uncle with the folding chair? The folding chair was first patented by the Black inventor Nathaniel Alexander.
No wonder TikTok has been joking that the ancestors came through. In a way, I agree. But in a less literal sense. After all, who are we but a manifestation of all our ancestors? Our solidarity, our willingness to help, to not be bystanders can be learned but it can also come from centuries of doing the same thing. Even making jokes, swinging folding chairs, and laughing together can be a kind of resistance and persistence of memory.
In that spirit, I give you a small selection of TikTok’s finest responses:
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☕ The Zeitgeist ☕
Hot topics from across the internet
Attention, Swifties, 1989 (Taylor's Version) will be released on October 27th.
Barbie reached $1 billion at the box office. Barbillion, baby!
A teen influencer was at the center of a death hoax after a post claimed Lil Tay was dead.
Red, White, & Royal Blue debuted on Prime to some mixed reviews.
Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta, get those robots!
A billionaire is trying to make himself younger by spending millions each year on treatments and if you’re sick of hearing about him— same, we all are!
Fires in Hawaii have displaced thousands and led to significant loss of life, as well as the destruction of ancient sacred sites. Native Hawaiians have been particularly impacted, drawing attention to disparities between Hawaiians and tourists including in media coverage. Many Native Hawaiians have also been organizing aid for victims of the wildfires.
Find resources here.
🥡 The Takeaway 🥡
What do we do when a platform dies?
It’s a question on my mind this week. Particularly after reading this piece from Cory Doctorow on the rise and fall of platforms.
HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
As noted in the blog post, business interests are in opposition to the interests of users. Therefore, users tend to flee when platforms shift from showing users what they want to what their business partners want.
While I can’t, personally, tell you that the downfall of TikTok (or even the zombie X née Twitter) is imminent I agree that platforms inevitably rise and fall. TikTok will go the way of MySpace one day. And yes, like much else, capitalism will be to blame.
As a marketer and social media manager, it would be easy to defend features that make it easier for advertisers. Who doesn’t want their posts randomly ‘heated’? But I agree with Doctorow when it comes to these tech companies. We don’t need immortal sites. But we do need the communities we build on them. At the end of the day, I’m not just a marketer I’m an organizer.
The ability to organize and build community online is what pulls us into these sites. Twitter would never have held me if not for Black Twitter. Creatives make these places what they are. Think of social media like a club. You can rent the room, and you can even install some new lights when people start coming in, but the second you’re only playing your cousin’s tracks? Game over. It’s about the people, it always is.
So then what do we do when a platform dies? We pick ourselves up and we keep it moving.