DANCE LIKE EVERYBODY’S WATCHING
Oh my God,” I think to myself, as I scroll through TikTok from my lounge room floor. “I’ve landed in the Deep South.”
A very confident older lady appears on my phone screen, dressed in a USA-flag bikini top, matching USA-flag knock-off Crocs and tight denim shorts. I watch on, mouth agape, as the woman (@sheilafromflorida, 45k+ followers) begins gyrating on her front porch to Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’. It’s hard to look away.
I tap her profile and another video appears. This time, she’s seated in a wicker outdoor chair, swaying her hips to Ginuwine’s ‘Pony’ (“You’re horny, let’s do it”) while wearing a Panama City Beach T-shirt with a Confederate flag emblazoned on the front. I scroll again and then I see it: Sheila is spitting Rico Nasty’s verse from Yunggt3z’ ‘No Reason’, one of the most popular lip-sync songs on TikTok in 2019. If just a couple of years ago, you’d have told me a grandmother from the heart of Trump’s America would be rapping on a Chinese social media app, responsible for creating some of the world’s biggest music hits, I would have thought you were crazy. But here we are.
First, some background. For those over the age of 25 – Sheila aside – TikTok is a hugely popular social media app based on 15-second video clips, powered by AI technology and favoured by Gen Z. Owned by Chinese mega start-up ByteDance, TikTok launched internationally in 2017 soon after merging with similar music-based app, Musical.ly, and the sheer ferocity of its growth saw ByteDance’s value climb to more than $122bn in late 2018, stealing Uber’s crown as the world’s biggest start-up. Last year, TikTok was the second most downloaded app in the world, behind only Facebook’s WhatsApp.
The concept behind TikTok is nothing new. Music apps Musical.ly, Dubsmash and
