![]() Though some tracks may go viral on TikTok because they inspire a series of endlessly replicable dance moves, or because they’re well suited to a before-and-after reveal, others simply entice users to stare at their front-facing camera, slack-jawed, and loosely mouth a lyric. Certain corners of TikTok are an especially good fit for these kinds of gently devastated sentiments, which seem to reflect a vague generational malaise born, ironically, from pandemic isolation and an overreliance on social media. Maybe not every chance forgone is cataclysmic maybe some missed shots are just a bummer. While songs of regret are not uncommon, something about Lacy’s lackadaisical delivery-“It’s O.K., things happen for / Reasons that I can’t ignore,” he sings in the second chorus-is beguiling. singer Fousheé, a frequent collaborator of Lacy’s, is a co-writer of “Bad Habit.”) Lacy’s vocals have the sort of hangdog ruefulness familiar to anyone who has failed to seize an opportunity, or has self-sabotaged their way out of something great. “Kinda mad that I didn’t take a stab at it,” he adds. “I bite my tongue, it’s a bad habit,” Lacy sings, over a sprightly, warped-sounding guitar riff. “Bad Habit” is, at heart, a song about remorse, impostor syndrome, timidity, acquiescence, and the sort of unnecessary meekness that, at one point or another, comes for us all. Lacy performed the song on “S.N.L.,” and is now nominated for four Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, Lacy’s “ Bad Habit” finally unseated Harry Styles’s “ As It Was,” and stayed at No. In early October, after hovering for four weeks at No. The most interesting song to move from TikTok to the top of the charts this year was by a twenty-four-year-old singer and guitarist from Compton named Steve Lacy. My colleague John Seabrook recently explored the music industry’s mostly failed efforts to dissect and harness TikTok’s influence, ultimately noting that “all a digital marketer can do is closely monitor what’s happening organically on TikTok, and then hire creators to juice the trend.” It’s almost fun to imagine the number of frantic, irritated conversations that have gone down in the air-conditioned conference rooms of record labels, as panicked executives attempt to reverse-engineer a phenomenon that does not appear to hew to any known laws of commerce. How and why does a song gain sudden purchase on TikTok? No one quite knows. The platform now routinely resuscitates ancient bangers, or gives sudden credence to new and obscure ones. What happened to “Dreams” is an early example of TikTok’s power, but it’s no longer an anomalous one. ![]() Back in 2020, a user named Nathan Apodaca filmed himself riding his skateboard while pulling heartily from a bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice and singing along to Fleetwood Mac’s gauzy, winsome “ Dreams.” Apodaca’s twenty-two-second video went wildly viral, and sent “Dreams,” which was first released as a single in 1977, to the top of the iTunes chart and to No. Sometimes the results of all that disorder are surprisingly pure. ![]() TikTok relies on feeding its users an endless torrent of decontextualized, punchy videos its capacity to send an old or unremarkable song onto the Billboard Hot 100 is by now well documented, if still not entirely understood. ![]() Hitmaking has always been an inscrutable racket-who or what might resonate for a large audience at any given moment isn’t particularly easy to predict-but the emergence of TikTok as a star-making force has made the pop charts feel especially anarchic.
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