TikTok Teens Are Romanticising ‘Millennial Music’ And That’s Quite Enough, Thank You
"Millennials when they remember what it felt like being four vodka sodas deep in the summer of 'We Found Love'."
We all knew this day was coming. It seems but yesterday we were happily sitting there whiling away the time on tumblr, listening to Arctic Monkeys AM and Two Door Cinema Club. Now, we suddenly find our former lives being romanticised by teens on an app that didn’t even exist a few years ago. Time is fleeting, friends, moments are precious.
In recent months, there’s been a slow and steady increase of videos on TikTok blissfully remembering the olden days of 2010s indie music and, more worryingly, ‘millennial music’, which seems to encompass basically everything from the 00s and 10s.
An entire account, run by @lexisnot, is actually dedicated to “unlocking millennial music memories” — perhaps a little alarming because a lot of these songs do not seem like ‘memories’ at all and rather still make up our daily playlists. Regardless, she hits the mark with disturbing accuracy:
The use of Zedd’s ‘Clarity’ really does send you off the edge of a cliff, doesn’t it? It’s not just mainstream millennial pop that’s getting skewered, recently there’s been a rise of videos about the ‘2014 tumblr aesthetic’ and emo/scene kids:
Vox did an excellent deep dive into this trend last year, it’s well worth a read. And speaking of Arctic Monkeys and Two Door Cinema Club, those two bands have become the focus of indie nostalgia on the app — clips of the two bands, particularly this one of TDCC playing ‘What You Know’ to a mammoth crowd at Reading festival in 2011, regularly go viral:
There’s also numerous wrap ups of ‘iconic’ songs from the 2010s — and challenges over whether the tracks were bops or not.
It’s only a matter of time until they discover Kreayshawn’s ‘Gucci Gucci‘.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put on ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ and stare directly into the sun.