The year TikTok really took over music
Or how a truly awful song landed on Barack Obama’s favorites list
Every summer, former President Barack Obama gives every American a very special present: a playlist of songs he’s allegedly been listening to recently.
Obama’s heavily curated lists, which he also puts out at the end of the year, normally manage to make their way into the Twitter discourse for a day or two before fading out of the zeitgeist (remember when Obama put Parasite in his top movies?).
Yet one selection from this summer has refused to leave my brain. Out of all the excellent music released this year (more on that later in this newsletter), the Obama team picked “Astronaut in the Ocean” by Masked Wolf as one of his favorite modern tracks.
If you haven’t listened to this song yet, don’t.
The painfully generic trap beat is only made worse by Masked Wolf’s incredibly cringe inducing lyrics, including my personal favorite gem “I believe in G-O-D (Ayy) / Don't believe in T-H-O-T.”
This newsletter is not about dunking on the Australian rapper though. It’s not even about dunking on Obama’s lists.
The lists reveal very little about Obama beyond what dominates slightly-highbrow pop culture every year, I’m under no illusions that he actually listens to these songs.
What the inclusion of “Astronaut in the Ocean” on the former president’s list does reveal is the gorilla grip TikTok has on music right now.
The track was first released in June 2019 to little fanfare. But when the world started going into lockdown in 2020, something strange happened. A snippet of the track where Masked Wolf asks “What you know about rolling down in the deep?” in an exaggerated country accent blew up as a sound on TikTok.
While some used the snippet to soundtrack “epic” moments, the vast majority of the videos were making fun of the sound.
One user dedicated himself to mixing “Astronaut in the Ocean” with other tracks to create increasingly unlistenable experiences. Check out this car crash with fellow blew-up-online-but-is-awful-song “Dance Monkey.”
The fact that the song was being roundly mocked didn’t really matter though on a platform that claims to have over 1 billion monthly users. The sound was used millions of times (it has now been used in over 8 million videos) and that notoriety translated into streams, presumably through a combination of morbid curiosity and some genuine interest. The music industry took notice.
“We instantly leaned into that because TikTok is fickle and it’s short-lived,” Jacob Fain, senior vice president of A&R at Elektra Records, which signed Masked Wolf late last year, told Billboard in April. “So when you get that window, you really need to reposition and then just capitalize on it for as long as TikTok will allow you to.”
By time the Obama put it on his list, “Astronaut in the Ocean” had most likely accrued over 1 billion listens across streaming platforms. Leaving out a track with that much international success was hardly an option for a retiree looking to impress the internet.
I’m happy that Masked Wolf has turned what started as public humiliation into a relatively successful music career (he’s since released a collab with Bebe Rexha that at least sounds like it belongs on the radio), but it really is wild to see just how much TikTok has warped the industry.
For example, famous TikTok sister Dixie D’Amelio has more monthly listeners on Spotify than Maggie Rogers, Kim Petras or Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher combined. Her first and most popular song, “Be Happy,” endured a ridicule cycle just like “Astronaut in the Ocean” on the road to nearly 100 million plays.
TikTok hasn’t only elevated derivative music. Some super exciting artists, like Remi Wolf, have been able to capitalize on viral sounds. The excellent Dev Lemons has boosted her young music career through the popularity she got dissecting music on the platform.
The influence seems to go both directions as well – there a solid handful of recent releases by high profile artists that have segments that sound built in a lab to blow up on TikTok (see: Doja Cat).
TikTok is the most popular app (and maybe even domain) in the world now. That it would have a major effect on culture is to be expected, but the way that it’s dominated what music is popular – to the point that an American president thinks publicly liking an awful song will keep him looking “cool” – is staggering.
Extra! Extra!
As little treat to faithful readers starved of content, here’s my top 12 albums of the year. I actually found myself struggling a bit more than most years on this one, partly because I spent a lot of the year filling in the pre-2015 gaps in my music knowledge and partly because a lot of the tracks that stood out to me this year were either on tiny EPs or tucked inside overall disappointing projects (yes I realize the irony of saying that and including Donda, but c’mon the highs that Kanye delivered were worth the lows and pt 2’s).
