no such thing as cynical music
on trying
A while ago there was a TikTok meme that I happened to see that was something like… “this is what every Taylor Swift song sounds like.”1 It would show a video of somebody’s baffled face listening to a weird, rambling, off-key piano ballad. Pretty standard kind of TikTok joke, if not particularly funny because the song was just… strange. It didn’t sound like a Taylor Swift song or really any kind of song at all.
What I didn’t realize until I looked into it a little—and what 90% of the people making this joke probably didn’t realize either, I would guess—is that this tune wasn’t a joke composition somebody made for TikTok (like this guy does) but a song written by a disabled woman with dwarfism who uploads her songs and her song-making process on TikTok.2 Which is why it wasn’t a very good Taylor parody.3 It wasn’t a parody of anything! It was just its own song.