How to survive a TikTok hit song

It's hard to be a musician on social media.

This is the work newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I post on Bluesky, X, and Instagram.

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For years now I’ve been fascinated by this YouTube video that chops out the chorus of a TikTok-famous song called “Tek It” and loops it for ten minutes straight. The video is an audio overdose, excising the most addictive part of a track to listen to it over and over again — it’s almost more ASMR than actual music. I’ve always wanted to hear about the band Cafuné’s experience of having “Tek It” go mega-viral on TikTok in 2022 and adapting to the new realm of compressed, looped, user-remixed music online. So their new album Bite Reality coming out September 12 gave me the perfect chance to write a column about the whole thing:

The band told me about the pressure of creating content in order to promote their music and the ways in which the audience now has power over how songs sound. Here’s a paragraph:

“Tek It” became one of the emblematic songs of TikTok’s rise in the United States. Riding its momentum, Cafuné signed to the major record label Elektra. “Everyone who goes viral is immediately pressed with the same task, which is to keep the ball in the air,” Yoo said. The band hustled to build their social-media accounts, play shows, and produce a new EP. They also put out an official sped-up version of “Tek It,” replicating the most popular online iteration. “Tek It” and its variations now have more than a billion streams on Spotify, a success by any measure. But the band’s boom was short-lived. In 2024, Cafuné was dropped from Elektra amid a wave of music-industry restructuring. “That amount of profit wasn’t enough to convince anyone of anything,” Yoo said. Cut loose, the duo decided to use their earnings to spend a whole year acting like a more traditional band: writing songs full time, guided by nothing other than their creative whims. They put together an album to release on their own independent label, Aurelians Club, and signed a distribution deal with SoundOn, TikTok’s in-house musician platform. Schat told me mordantly, “It’s funny that the TikTok corporation gave us more favorable terms than any label was capable of giving.” Every musician today is forced to become a content creator, “whether they want to be or not,” Yoo added. “It feels like we’ve all become, like, employees for platforms.”

Listen to the very fun lead single “e-Asphyxiation” — the lyrics are all about the frustration of not wanting to be so online: I don’t want to post my face anymore. (Fans often compare Cafuné’s music to the outro of a 90s anime, that should tell you if you’ll like it.) It’s very relatable; the internet is so toxic but we kind of have no choice but to interact with it if we want to be heard as musicians / writers / artists / citizens.

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More new music

Nourished By Time is one of the few new musicians / bands I’ve gotten really into in the last year or two. (Otherwise I’ve just been going deep into the ‘60s jazz and samba archives, I’m guilty.) His new album The Passionate Ones is out now and it’s great. The vibe is a bit indescribable. Soaring vocals, abstracted lyrics, wavy synths, twisted samples, dancey club beats like a rave in an abandoned brutalist building. It feels very new. Start with the bouncy “9 2 5” or my current fav “Baby Baby”.

Labubus and the brainrot aesthetic

Why is everything so ugly and weird looking?

This is the work newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I post on Bluesky, X, and Instagram.

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You might have seen the little fuzzy toy monsters around or heard the name Labubu. (I am told they now cost $65 on the black market.) Maybe you’ve seen signs for Dubai chocolate, or a garish new strawberry matcha latte from Starbucks. Or a smoothie that looks like a rainbow cyclone, with some kind of seaweed in it. I think there’s a new Gen Z aesthetic emerging, one that’s often visually ugly or yucky but also freighted with symbolism. I wrote a long-ish essay for The New Yorker about this “IRL Brain Rot” lifestyle and the mutability and mutation of the digital self:

don’t miss the animated art and diagram from Nicholas Konrad

Something I love doing in essay writing is gathering a big group of cultural phenomena and “drawing a circle around it,” as an editor once put it to me — demonstrating how all of these things are connected, responding to the same themes and perhaps anxieties in contemporary life. It’s easy to dismiss youth-culture trends or just see them as capitalistic trash, but I think this slop-adjacent realm of dupe products and Instagrammable potions points to our increasingly desperate need to manipulate our own images, and an acceptance of the fact that we’re kind of hybridized monsters ourselves in this post-A.I. human-machine moment:

These products feel hallucinatory. They take the social-media mandate of self-modification to its logical extreme, embracing easy-breezy chemical additives and image augmentation: enhancing the self until it spills from its pores. The aesthetic is as much a defense mechanism against the internet era as it is a self-aware in-joke: We can see what late-hyper-digital-artificially-intelligent capitalism is doing to us—isn’t it a laugh? “It’s very unnatural-looking,” the cultural critic Dean Kissick told me, describing the dominant visual style of extremely online consumerism. “It kind of relishes its own artificiality.” Any pretense of the pure or organic is undercut by a kind of willful alchemy; everything is an admixture.

In this case, the keystone for me was seeing that the generic drug / beauty brand Hers makes an Ozempic-like semaglutide in packaging the color of matcha, mingling two trends that appear vastly different. One is a green caffeinated beverage and the other is an injection that dampens your desire to consume and helps you lose weight. Yet here they are crashing together, representing a runaway consumerism without a coherent endpoint. It’s magical thinking, which makes sense given the incomprehensibility of our moment. Go read the essay!

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Other recent columns

• Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui? A column on the decline of mundane content on social media and the lack of a desire to share your life when the rest of the internet is AI slop, bad news headlines, and polished influencers. I was interviewed about this piece a few times, including in a BBC video and Jon Favreau’s Offline podcast. And I made a talking-head video about it for The New Yorker that ironically got over 2 million views on Instagram!

• The Revenge of Millennial Cringe A good companion to Labubu brainrot, this column took on the viral clip of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros playing an indie stomp-clap song from 2009. Maybe unbridled sincerity is more appealing when everything is so confusing. Made another New Yorker video for this.

• A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts I read through studies and interviewed academics about experiments that prove generative A.I. makes us more generic as writers, thinkers, and communicators. Test subjects who used ChatGPT wrote more like each other, made the same arguments, and used less diverse vocabulary.

• Gentle-Parenting My Smartphone Addiction I’ve been using an app called Opal to block social media apps on my phone during the workday, and it’s been working surprisingly well! I had an insightful conversation with the app’s creator.

• Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics Whether it’s negotiations with Ukraine and Russia or the NYC mayoral race, politics is all about what you put out there on social media, the tone of your videos, images, and memes. Mamdani succeeded by adopting the latest TikTok style.

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As always please let me know what you think! Or should I just be posting videos of myself summarizing everything I write?? Subscribe to this newsletter with the button below if you don’t already.

The history of techno-fascism

DOGE's parallels with 1930s Japan

This is the personal newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my Internet column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I do more riff-y newsletter writing in One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I post most often on Bluesky and Instagram.

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What is it called when technology takes over the government? It’s helpful to have a label for what’s going on right now so that we can have a communal framework to discuss Elon Musk and DOGE. The upheaval is increasingly often being called a coup. But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg’s dictum to “move fast and break things” and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else. My latest column is about the ideas running through the Trump-Musk government’s actions, including techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, and techno-accelerationism. All of them have to do with giving tech free rein in the operation of the state, not just the websites we visit for fun.

For the piece, I spoke with the academic Janis Mimura, who studies the fascist Japanese government in World War II. Her book Planning for Empire looks at the little-known bureaucrats and political managerial class that took power under the guise of the emperor in the 1930s and pushed the nation into all-out war. Mimura has been struck by the parallels between those 1930s Japanese technocrats and Musk’s DOGE, both technology-driven groups who have taken on unanswerable authority. I really enjoyed my conversation with her and found it revealing for what we’re dealing with today. Here’s a bit from my column:

In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known as zaibatsu, he instituted a policy of forced industrial development based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the expense of private interests and labor rights.

What ended the rein of the technocrats was the dissolution of their alliance with conservative politicians and the military. Ultimately, the technocrats created a war machine that they themselves could not stop and they were pushed out of the government when they began to urge caution, wanting to avoid an unwinnable fight. It made me wonder which direction Musk and the other Silicon Valley CEOs are really pushing the U.S. in, and what it would take for the bond between Trump and Musk to dissolve.

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Notes

• My New Yorker colleague Lauren Michele Jackson wrote a great essay on “The End of Seriousness.” We want to laugh at the chaos that’s going on right now, but laughter, even at the blatant absurdity, doesn’t offer much relief. It pinpoints a feeling I’ve been having lately: We can’t not talk about Trump-Musk and the destabilized international arena, but we also can’t talk about it directly — it’s just too extreme, too dramatic, too unknown. A bleak newsletter, sorry!

Seeking distraction from Trump 2.0

Social media has changed since 2017.

This is the personal newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my Internet column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my earlier book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I do more riff-y newsletter writing in One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I post most often on Bluesky and Instagram.

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Distraction seems to be flowing in all directions the last few weeks. The flurry of extreme executive orders and dramatic media moments of the second Trump administration is distracting from the mass layoffs and cuts that Elon Musk is making with DOGE. And disaffected voters are seeking distraction from all of it: Tuning out politics news is tempting, especially when it’s unclear how much of this chaos will actually be meaningful in a few months. I wanted to find out what people are doing to absorb their attention elsewhere, which is the subject of my latest New Yorker column:

The answers included binging reality TV shows like Vanderpump Rules and Culinary Class Wars — streaming is immersive and absorbing — as well as cutting back on news consumption, period, turning off phone alerts and relying on summaries. Social media is a different place than it was during the first Trump administration. There is less political resistance and less coherence, period, because the platforms themselves have changed:

Doomscrolling, as Eiseman referenced—the overindulgence in anxiety-inducing news stories and commentators shouting in text online—accomplishes even less than it did before, because Internet discourse lacks any coherent direction. There is no longer a clean division of anti- and pro-Trump; the field is crowded and the President himself can appear at times sidelined by larger forces. The Democratic Party and its organizations seem at a loss to develop any kind of unifying messaging in the short term. But that inertia may be intensified by how the social-media ecosystem has palpably decayed since the late twenty-tens, and not just because the politics of the platforms have shifted toward Trump. A.I. is rampant, algorithmic feeds such as Instagram’s have been known to favor posts from businesses and aggregators over individuals, and Meta’s social networks have suppressed political content by default.

My conclusion is that you can’t rely on social media or the endless stream of news updates for insight into what’s going on right now. It can be unproductive, better to watch that reality show for a while and conserve your attention for later without getting overwhelmed. The metric that I’ve been thinking about is, which choices or actions make things meaningful in the context of your own life? Taking a walk or supporting a local institution you love is more meaningful than doomscrolling.

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Notes

• Here in DC, where some distraction is very necessary, we recently went to a concert at the 9:30 Club (a great local institution) of three bands: Nourished by Time, Panda Bear, and Toro y Moi. Nourished by Time, a musician from Baltimore, has been one of my favorite new sounds of the last year or two. The track “Daddy” is kind of deconstructed disco, dance beats and Dadaist lyrics, with a gothic grandeur behind it. Very cool, very different.