NB:
Last Friday, the Ides of March, marked the one year anniversary of this newsletter—Thank you, patient reader! (Apologies for the late posts. I’m traveling abroad with occasional wifi challenges.)
In a way, The Third Ear was born of an aborted book project about art, tech, and crazy cultural trends during the pandemic—especially those exacerbated by social media. With TikTok once again on the chopping block (in the U.S. Congress), I offer an excerpt adapted from that book (a collection of essays called Karaoke Singer: Letters on Art and Technocracy.)
As the title implies, the essays concern the link between art and tech, and forms of governance or social organization. Beginning in the 1970s, critical iconoclast David Hickey wrote a similar series of essays, which were eventually collected and published as Air Guitar: Letters on Art and Democracy (1997).
The history of TikTok that follows applies to developments up to 2022. (For more current developments and a supplemental history, read here: “Where Did TikTok Come From?”)
Empty Orchestra: Time and TikTok, “the subject of all our mourning”
Misgivings aside, I have encountered some interesting, original sounds on that new ‘listening’ medium, the app I’ve been suggestively circling, like a carrion crow, since the beginning of this essay: TikTok. Which, in certain manifestations, suggests a strange new matrimony of the visual and the musical… fueled by a powerful algorithm that is to MTV what crack cocaine was to powder.
The logo resembles a music note.
The soundbite that accompanies videos is visually represented as a spinning record, emanating bubbles of musical notation.
When I fired-up the app to confirm my memory of this iconography, I was ironically treated (by my own personalized algorithm), to video footage of a young Jerry Garcia, bemoaning the fact that, while musicians like himself take what little money they have (after the record companies get their cut), and altruistically pour it back into the musical community, record executives grub it for themselves, or spend their piece of the Grateful Dead’s hard-earned bread on corporate expansion.
Today, even the record companies have to relinquish part of their own share, to TikTok, passing the buck to artists, who bear the added weight of a new layer of technical hierarchy, while their wallets grow lighter.
The Grateful Dead offer a unique example of the reciprocal exchange between socio-economics, and Art and Democracy. The band’s one-of-a-kind live PA system, the “Wall of Sound”—which featured four enormous speaker columns, each as tall as a two-story building, with each column corresponding to one of Phil Lesh’s bass guitar strings, a bass Colossus—was financed by proceeds from Owsley Stanley’s entrepreneurial chemistry project: selling the LSD he cooked to denizens of the San Francisco underground. This countercultural history, along with Jerry Garcia’s now-ironic Jeremiad against corporate greed and manipulation on TikTok, can all be discovered on the app, along with live Grateful Dead performances.
Yes, there is endless original music, and cool new nano-second musical analyses and criticism, even singing and music lessons (!), to be found on TikTok, and it is democratic and vulgar in the best sense—anyone can create and distribute it. Until, that is, access to that original music, those analyses, those 60-second critiques and voice lessons, is throttled by the company CEO and, ultimately, his censorious overlords in the Chinese Communist Party.
Documents leaked by American TikTok employees in 2022 reveal the company’s PR strategy, outlined in what it calls, with a not-so-subtle stroke of totalitarian flare: the “Master Messaging Document.”
The leak suggests that TikTok is:
reticent to invite scrutiny of its algorithms and how they determine what gets seen—or heard. In the “Music” section of the Master Messaging Document, highlighted in red is a bullet point reading: “No algo talk - personalized content feed fuels new music discovery.’
—“Inside TikTok’s Attempts to ‘Downplay the China Association’,” Gizmodo. (July 2022.)
In other words, TikTok deflects attention from its powerful, manipulative algorithm by rebranding it as a benign equivalent of Pandora or Spotify, encouraging “new music discovery.” The company markets itself as a music platform, and in a dubious sleight of hand, suggests “Musical discovery” as a euphemism for “algo talk,”—i.e., words having to do with content moderation, propaganda and censorship. Where pop music once subverted control and censorship—often through its own euphemisms, mostly codewords for sex and drugs—“music” has now been bastardized into a corporate synonym for those very terms.
The TikTok ‘listening’ experience is about as ephemeral as viewing the shadow of a butterfly out of the corner of your eye on a sun-dappled day. A fleeting glance as you tune into the flutter and flicker, before it’s swiped away into the Idiot Wind. The algorithm never plays the same thing twice, so remember that the next time Bob Marley’s “Do It Twice” evokes the adagio rhythms of a real human emotion, that, It’s so nice, I wanna hear the same song twice.
Still, TikTok is where it’s at, babes, a force to be reckoned with, and euphemistically-speaking, it’s a new musical medium. The new musical medium, depending on your definition of music. Half the founding story belongs to a self-styled “philosopher” (his words), Chinese businessman Alex Zhu, who originally intended to develop a teaching-and-learning application.
Can you imagine that? If this mimetic monster was dedicated to pedagogy, rather than miseducation—and behavioral neurosis? By copycatting soundz, memes and vidz of influencers with Tourette Syndrome, or teens suffering from anorexia, or any number of boutique psychosomatic ‘illnesses,’ users and creators have, unbelievably, physiologically-reproduced the symptoms of these disorders in impressionable, adolescent TikTok viewers. Mostly teenage girls, who are more susceptible to anorexia, but less susceptible to Tourettes, than boys; girls who are in fact not diagnosed with Tourettes, but nonetheless develop nervous “tics” that mimic Tourette symptoms, after viewing—reality is stranger than fiction—“#TicTok,” a TikTok subculture devoted to the disorder. Suggestible followers succumb to repetitively shouting meme slogans or swear words uncontrollably, and suffer involuntary jerking and flapping reflexes.
This is powerful mimetic stuff, placing this silly little app in the domain of psychiatry, ‘magic’ and latter-day witchcraft.
What if more influencers were using the platform to propagate education, as Alex Zhu had originally intended, instead of social contagion? If humans were learning from the app, rather than the app “machine-learning” from human susceptibility?
Alas, as the Internet, network television, and every audience knows; as Kurt Cobain and David Foster Wallace articulated so well at the end of the last century: people don’t want to be informed, they want to be entertained. Here we are now, entertain us, with Infinite Jest.
Alex Zhu had to recalibrate for success.
On a visit to the American West Coast, the Philosopher-CEO caught a whiff of what Teen Spirit really smells like, what American kids were all about. On a commuter train from Mountain View to San Francisco, Al Zhu, immersed in profound philosophical reflection, observed that teenage railway passengers were doing one of two things, often simultaneously: taking selfies and videos of each other, and listening to music. He decided to combine the two pastimes, and founded a platform called musical.ly, based in Shanghai, destined to have an office in Santa Monica, since American teenagers initially took to the app more readily than their Chinese counterparts.
Musical.ly would combine music snippets with selfie videos, in which creators sing and dance along to selected tracks. In other words, karaoke.
Selfie-dance-video karaoke.
The other half of the TikTok origin story, the tale of a corporate personality cult, belongs to Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming: an antisocial recluse and former software engineer, who confesses his only interaction with coeds at university came from fixing their computers, which is how he met his wife, “winding her clock” (as Tristram Shandy would say). A once aspirant, now wildly successful tech-lord, known to hang motivational posters—blow-ups of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates—on his office walls at Microsoft, and later, as he birthed a giant Chinese tech conglomerate in Beijing, the ByteDance company.
ByteDance developed the Chinese prototype of TikTok (now the only version of TikTok available in China) called “Douyin,” known to censor and surveil content that makes the Chinese Communist Party look bad—like Uighur internment camps in Xinjiang, or the throttling of democracy in Hong Kong. (ByteDance also absorbed another, American company called “Flipagram” into the TikTok secret sauce, but I won’t bore you with any more of these insipid tech names.)
Just know this: in Pinyan—the simplified font system used to transliterate Chinese characters into Roman ones, enabling foreign Mandarin students to read and write Chinese words without the added difficulty of mastering Chinese script—“Douyin,” the name for the Chinese version of TikTok, means “to make fun of.”
{ NB: These essays on Art and Technocracy were partially inspired by watching a young woman, during the pandemic, recording a dance video for TikTok in front of… a sacred oak tree. (Seriously; I’ve watched neighbors engage in various forms of New Age worship around this 100-year-old oak tree, countless times.) The experience made me wonder whether social media like this was a pseudo-spiritual substitute for ritual—but I think Ted Gioia put it best:
Memes are rituals drained of transcendence. They pathetically imitate the essential elements of ritual—repetition, symbol, shared meaning—but at the lowest possible level, namely that of a joke.
And Tik Tok, Douyin, is one big joke, “to make fun of.”
In other words (Latin and English words), douyin is the Sino-Roman equivalent of illuder: to “mock, play, or imitate.” And Illusion, as critic David Hickey said, whether speaking about Siegfried and Roy shows or Renaissance portraits of lost loved ones, is “always about time—time past, remote, or imagined—and always a matter of timing.”
On TikTok, time is fleeting. Tick. Tock. Goes the clock—in Hickey’s words, “the subject of all our mourning.” The passing time we waste and try to entertain or “hold onto,” or simply ignore through distraction. The TikTok logo, as I said, resembles a music note. It’s also a stylized “d,” for douyin.
The “illusion,” or mockery, of ‘music.’ Which is really just a tabloid algorithm designed to steal your attention…
Yoko Ono Having an Affair with Hillary Clinton!
This juicy tidbit, mixing musical celebrity with absurdist political propaganda, comes from “TopBuzz,” a failed news aggregator app created by ByteDance in 2015, now defunct. Like TikTok, TopBuzz relied on machine-learning technology to recommend content to users, with curious results. The fake Yo-Hillary love story in the imaginary headline above was promoted on TikTok, through push notifications, by the parent company’s news app. (“TikTok Owner ByteDance Used A News App On Millions Of Phones To Push Pro-China Messages, Ex-Employees Say,” Buzzfeed News (July 2022))
TikTok has also been known to scrape news content from legacy media like The New York Times, passing it off as its own, similar to the way musical.ly once pirated short sound clips from AppleMusic, repurposing them as loops for dance-video soundtracks (more on that in a moment). Rather than just pilfering news, the app is now looking to develop AI to write its own bylines, bypassing the need to ‘source content’ from The New York Times.
Yoko Ono Having an Affair with Hillary Clinton! is an appropriately symbolic headline for the unlicensed ‘sampling’ of news by ByteDance; for its resemblance to the sampling of pirated music; and the use of both for political propaganda (“Musical discovery” remember, is the “Master Messaging Document’s” preferred euphemism for “algo-talk,” or content moderation). TopBuzz, like TikTok, has been accused of censoring and/or pushing fake China-related content. Not to mention fake Japanese-American content in the form of Yoko Ono and Hillary Clinton.
Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, recognized that, if he wanted to become the next Bill Zucker-Jobs, in his words, “going global” was “a must,” for ByteDance and Douyin, soon rebranded as TikTok.
Musical.ly, Alex Zhu’s Sino-American brainchild, was TikTok’s ticket to the U.S., and thus the global, market. Yiming’s ByteDance merged with Zhu’s musical.ly, leveraging its huge young-American user base, buying it out to the tune of approximately one billion U.S. dollars, on November 9, 2017—the day the musical.ly died.
Musical.ly, as I said, was originally a lip-synching app, where kids could make short videos of themselves, singing along to repetitive loops from popular tunes, pirated from the 15-second sample clips available for free on AppleMusic—like the snippets that iTunes consumers sample before purchasing an entire song, or not.
The recipe is familiar, but new. A huge American teenage market, combined with pop music—the two essential ingredients for success in early rock ’n’ roll. Combined with video, like early MTV. Repeating short samples of pre-extant, pirated music, like early hip-hop. With a Karaoke element to it.
Karaoke, by the way, derives from the Japanese word for “empty” or “void,” combined with the English word “orchestra.” Empty Orchestra: a fitting moniker for the musical void.
One billion TikTok users are singing along with it right now.
Musical.ly was a wildly popular underground phenomenon among American tweens, but once it merged into a hybrid monster with ByteDance, it became a juggernaut Internet sensation crushing every competitor in its path—TikTok.
Sony, Warner and Universal took note early, plugging talent and scouting undiscovered A&R accordingly. My fellow Houstonian, Megan Thee Stallion, owes a large portion of her whopping (“WAP”ping) success to innate talent, her friend Beyoncé, and viral exposure on TikTok.
By 2020, TikTok was at the center of a mediated geopolitical struggle between the two most powerful nations on earth, with China and the U.S. vying for ownership and control over the highly influential app. Trump infamously wanted it banned, or bought-out, by “a very American company,” such as Walmart, Microsoft, or one other tech company with a highly-suggestive name: Oracle.
One who tells the future, or tells us what to think.
The buy-out, like the ban, never came to fruition [since 2022, a recent bill has passed the House, in March 2024, currently awaiting the Senate]. Instead, the legislative Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CIFIUS) brokered a deal with U.S. data host Oracle, which agreed to firewall American user data from TikTok, safeguarding sensitive information from ByteDance leadership in Beijing, in what was known as “Project Texas.”
As of 2022, TikTok said it would continue to allow Chinese ByteDance employees to access American user data, which it would continue to use to promote Chinese tourism (like the rose-tinted depiction of Xinjiang, the site of Uighur internment camps, that I was treated to on the app)—and, very likely, future tabloid romances like the ballad of Hillary and Yoko.
In 2020, the American military bespoke national defense and security concerns, since teen and twenty-something Armed Service members constituted one of TikTok’s many subcultures (now monitored and restricted, by the U.S. government), and young American soldiers were sharing confidential content, created while they were deployed overseas.
India, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the U.S.—and China itself, when it comes to the American-grade content on TikTok vs the pedagogical content on Douyin—have all attempted to censor TikTok, if not ban it outright. (TikTok is banned in China, the country that controls TikTok. An earlier version of the App was removed because, according to the CCP, it threatened social unrest.) But TikTok has proven irrepressible, in many cases and places, a cyber samizdat.
The latest catalyst for music-driven ‘revolution’—revolution “at the lowest possible level, namely that of a joke.” The spinning-record app where K-pop (South Korean music) fans conspired to punk a Trump rally in Tulsa, by inflating attendance projections online. Leading up to a contentious presidential election in 2020, TikTok influencers shared sarcastic memes encouraging K-cult “followers” to buy up hundreds of Trump rally seats, then leave them empty—embarrassing optics for a President obsessed with crowd size. The Twitter King was furious.
The latest medium, promoting the latest global music craze, K-Pop. South Korean boy bands, some of them scandalously imitating the time-honored American ritual of racial impersonation: performing in blackface. Mockingbirds like Mick Jagger may have ‘sung in blackface,’ and hillbilly-face, and every other face, appropriating the mannerisms of regional musical traditions, but that was Love and Theft, sanctioned in part by stalwarts of the black community like Aretha Franklin, with reparations paid to Muddy Waters, and numerous elder blues-statesmen like him, whose careers the Rolling Stones helped resuscitate by popularizing their songs, kicking-off the so-called “blues revival.” Saints be damned if there will ever be any rock and soul in K-pop, or on TikTok. But there will be blackface.
And more political controversy to come.