Hello from The Goods newsletter twice a week! On Tuesdays, Internet Culture Reporter Rebecca Jennings use this space to keep you up to date with what’s going on in the world of TikTok. Is there anything you want to see more of? Less than? Other than? Email [email protected], en subscribe to The Goods newsletter here.
When Spotify showed each of its users their most popular songs and artists of 2020 a few months ago, I saw a meme that looks like someone’s most listened genre is ‘1800s shanties’. I laugh and post it again in my Instagram story and think: ”Sea shanty, ‘ it’s a term you do not hear every day now “and forgot it.
That was, until two weeks ago, when a real, live sea shanty came across my TikTok ‘For You’ page. The video shows a man singing a song that I could barely make out because of his thick Scottish accent, but definitely said something about a ship and a shore. Another man added several tenor and baritone lines to harmonize with the song. It sounded good in a kind of brain condition way, but my first thought was more like this is the hardest thing i’ve ever seen and so rolled past.
But looking back, I should have known that this was exactly the kind of thing the internet would descend on and hold on to a ferocity bigger than a swinging sailor grabbing a paddle in a mid-Atlantic storm. I literally had to be able to imagine the tweet hundreds of thousands of likes says “SeaShantyTok is getting better” or declares 2021 as the “year of the sea shanty“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 from TikTok took to Twitter, where a much larger number of adult journalists consumed news. Of course, all the sites tried to explain why a random New Zealand sea suit called “Wellerman” was suddenly stuck in everyone’s head. ‘Sea stockings have taken over TikTok. That’s why, ”CNET wrote. The New York Times stepped in to correct us (these are actually ‘whaling songs’) while the New Yorker did what the New Yorker does best: Speak words strangely (what is ‘sea-chantey?’).
“Um, it makes perfect sense that we are all sea-shanties now,” Vulture claims, “the reason being this is” they are unifying, surviving songs, designed to transform a large group of people into one common body, which all work together around the ship above water. Few have gone so far as to elevate a handful of TikToks to undeserved significance as the Washington Post, whose (surely semi-ironic) headline ‘Sea shanties’ is here to save us. ‘
I’m sorry to inform you: it is not.
The thing about viral sea shanties is that there is literally nothing to explain. It is not necessary to square TikTok with our current political moment or pretend that there was something inevitable about the popularity of sea shanties in early January 2021.
You can replace the heading “Sea shanties are here to save us” with literally any “heartwarming” trend that came out of TikTok last year. “The cranberry juice skateboard to Fleetwood Mac is here to save us.” “This girl rollerblading to ‘Jenny From the Block’ is here to save us.” “The Ratatouille musical is coming to save us ”was a real headline from December. Did any of these trends last longer than a few weeks? Of course not.
What actually happens is the amalgamation of various forces that move niche content in front of an enormous amount of eyeballs. TikTok is full of unconventional subcultures, definitely more unconventional than I have ever encountered. The algorithm uses AI trained to detect trending videos, combined with a sprinkling of pure randomness, which means that the videos sometimes get very viral.
The probable chain of events was this: someone showed a particularly moving video of several people singing and liking a sea shanty, and it was then shown to more people who liked it too, and then someone likes it enough to post it on Twitter, where it went even more viral, because Twitter is the exact audience that would look at this and would be: “Wow, sea shanties go viral on TikTok, how weird and uplifting!” Then a bunch of reporters like me saw it and knew it would make decent content on our sites, because readers and viewers like to see things that are new but also familiar, especially now, when our brains are exhausted from constant stimulation, but desperate for even more of it.
This is the reason why phenomena like sea stockings happen over and over again and why none of them ultimately matter. Like Kyle Chayka and Taylor Lorenz discussed on Twitter, “The internet in the quarantine era is just letting us move faster and faster through obscure cultures,” and “It’s kind of a dumb unimportant / non-controversial piece of culture that everyone can write / talk about. ‘Baffler editor Jess Bergman tweeted“If I see another statement about sea shorts in the teen video app, I’ll go by mail.”
Of course, we are all people whose job it is to interpret the internet, but I feel that there is also fatigue on the consumer side. When Elon Musk, the richest man in human history and terminal sufferer of diseases, tweeted about sea urchins, it was then smart compare to Denny’s Twitter account to kill memes in the 2010s. People annoy them for this stuff. There’s just too much of it.
It would be great if soaps did save us, right? But we already know better, because the Ratatouille the musical did not save us, nor did the Fleetwood Mac skateboarder, nor will it be two weeks from now “everyone on TikTok is mad at!” (probably the Bridgerton musical). To avoid sounding like the world’s greatest curmudgeon, I think it’s generally fun to watch people discover and enjoy something they would otherwise have had or to collaborate on the internet (the video where ‘ a lot of people sing Smash Mouth’s “All Star” in Anger of the Sea is funny), but none of it is unique to sea stockings. That’s just how things work now.
I leave you with the refrain of the Wellerman song, which you could argue is also a metaphor for finding hope on the internet. Maybe one day, after we finish work, things will get better and we can all get out of here.
The Wellerman may be here soon
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tongue is finished
We say goodbye and go
TikTok in the news
One last thing
If you have not yet seen the TikTok of Kansas State Representative Christina Haswood getting ready to swear in the Kansas House of Representatives in the traditional Navajo regalia, I do not know what to tell you other than to see it if you want joy!