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      How Louis Theroux Became a ‘Jiggle Jiggle’ Sensation at Age 52

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      Decades into his career, the British American journalist has an unlikely TikTok hit that could be the song of the summer. “I am not trying to make it as a rapper,” he says.Four or five times a week these days, some old friend will contact Louis Theroux and tell him, “My daughter keeps going around the house singing your rap,” or, “My wife was exercising to your rap in her Pilates class.” Passing by a primary school, Mr. Theroux has the feeling he is being watched, a sense confirmed when he hears a kid call out behind him: “My money don’t jiggle jiggle.”His agent has been fielding dozens of requests for personal appearances and invitations to perform. Mr. Theroux, a 52-year-old British American documentary filmmaker with a bookish, somewhat anxious demeanor, has turned them all down, not least because, as he put it in a video interview from his London home, “I am not trying to make it as a rapper.”But in a way, he already has: Mr. Theroux is the man behind “Jiggle Jiggle,” a sensation on TikTok and YouTube, where it has been streamed hundreds of millions of times. He delivers the rap in an understated voice that bears traces of his Oxford education, giving an amusing lilt to the lines “My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds/I’d like to see you wiggle, wiggle, for sure.”For Mr. Theroux, a son of the American author Paul Theroux and a cousin of the actor Justin Theroux, the whole episode has been odd and a little unsettling. “I’m pleased that people are enjoying the rap,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a part of me that has a degree of mixed feelings. It’s a bittersweet thing to experience a breakthrough moment of virality through something that, on the face of it, seems so disposable and so out of keeping with what it is that I actually do in my work. But there we are.”The story of how this middle-aged father of three has taken hold of youth culture with a novelty rap is “a baffling 21st century example of just the weirdness of the world that we live in,” Mr. Theroux said.“Jiggle Jiggle” gestated for years before it became all the rage. It started in 2000, when Mr. Theroux was hosting “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends,” a BBC Two series in which he delved into various subcultures. For an episode in the third and final season, he traveled to the American South, where he met a number of rappers, including Master P. As part of the show, he decided to do a rap himself, but he had only a few meager lines: “Jiggle Jiggle/I love it when you wiggle/It makes me want to dribble/Fancy a fiddle?”Mr. Theroux with the rapper Master P. in a 2000 episode of the BBC Two series “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.”BBC TwoHe enlisted Reese & Bigalow, a rap duo in Jackson, Miss., to help him work it into shape. Bigalow cleaned up the opening lines and linked the word “jiggle” with the word “jingle” to suggest the sound of coins in your pocket. Reese asked him what kind of car he drove. His reply — Fiat Tipo — led to the lines, “Riding in my Fiat/You really have to see it/Six-feet-two in a compact/No slack but luckily the seats go back.”“Reese & Bigalow infused the rap with a genuine quality,” Mr. Theroux said. “The elements that make it special, I could never have written on my own. At the risk of overanalyzing it, the genius part of it, in my mind, was saying, ‘My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds.’ There was something very satisfying about the cadence of those words.”He filmed himself performing the song live on the New Orleans hip-hop station Q93, and BBC viewers witnessed his rap debut when the episode aired in the fall of 2000. That might have been the end of “Jiggle Jiggle” — but “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” got new life in 2016, when Netflix licensed the show and started streaming it on Netflix UK. The rap episode became a favorite, and whenever Mr. Theroux made the publicity rounds for a new project, interviewers would inevitably ask him about his hip-hop foray.In February of this year, while promoting a new show, “Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America,” Mr. Theroux sat down for an interview on the popular web talk show “Chicken Shop Date,” hosted by the London comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg.“Can you remember any of the rap that you did?” Ms. Dimoldenberg asked, prompting Mr. Theroux to launch into his rhymes in what he described as “my slightly po-faced and dry English delivery.”“What happened subsequently is the most mystifying part,” he added.Mr. Theroux’s February appearance on “Chicken Shop Date,” a popular British web series, kicked off new interest in his 22-year-old rap song.Chicken Shop DateLuke Conibear and Isaac McKelvey, a pair of DJ-producers in Manchester, England, known as Duke & Jones, plucked the audio from “Chicken Shop Date” and set it to a backing track with an easygoing beat. Then they uploaded the song to their YouTube account, where it has 12 million views and counting.But “Jiggle Jiggle” became a phenomenon thanks largely to Jess Qualter and Brooke Blewitt, 21-year-old graduates of Laine Theater Arts, a performing arts college in Surrey, England. In April, the two friends were making pasta at their shared apartment when they heard the song and hastily choreographed moves suited to the track — dribbling a basketball, turning a steering wheel — and the “Jiggle Jiggle” dance was born.Wearing hooded sweatshirts and shades (an outfit chosen because they weren’t wearing makeup, the women said in an interview), Ms. Qualter and Ms. Blewitt made a 27-second video of themselves performing the routine. It blew up shortly after Ms. Qualter posted it on TikTok. Copycat videos soon sprang up from TikTok users around the world.“This was all going on without me knowing about it,” Mr. Theroux said. “I got an email: ‘Hey, a remix of the rap you did on “Chicken Shop Date” is going viral and doing extraordinary things on TikTok.’ I’m, like, ‘Well, that’s funny and weird.’”It bursted out of TikTok and into the mainstream last month, when Shakira performed the “Jiggle Jiggle” dance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” Snoop Dogg, Megan Thee Stallion and Rita Ora have all posted themselves dancing to it. The cast of Downton Abbey jiggle-jiggled during a red carpet event.“Anthony Hopkins has just done a thing yesterday,” Mr. Theroux said. “It would be too much to call it a dance. It’s more of a twitch. But he’s doing something.”The whole episode has been strange for his three children, especially his 14-year-old son, who is big into TikTok. “‘Why is my dad, the most cringe guy in the universe, everywhere on TikTok?’” Mr. Theroux said, giving voice to his son’s reaction.“I’ve left my stank all over his timeline,” he continued. “I think it’s made him very confused and slightly resentful.”Mr. Theroux said he doesn’t know what to do with his newfound social media fame. “It’s not like I have a catalog and, like, now I can release all of my other novelty rap fragments,” he said.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesMs. Qualter and Ms. Blewitt find it equally surreal to see Shakira and others dancing to their moves. “I almost forget that we made that up,” Ms. Qualter said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s happened. It’s got over 60 million views. We see the number on the screen, but I can’t comprehend that there are people behind it.”After the original Duke & Jones remix went viral — that is, the one with the vocal track taken from “Chicken Shop Date” — the DJ-producer duo asked Mr. Theroux to redo his vocal in a recording studio. That way, instead of being just another TikTok ear-worm, “Jiggle Jiggle” could be made available on Spotify, iTunes and other platforms, and its makers could gain some exposure and profit from it.In addition to Mr. Theroux, five composers are credited on the official release: Duke & Jones; Reese & Bigalow; and the 81-year-old hitmaker Neil Diamond. Mr. Diamond became part of the crew when his representatives signed off on “Jiggle Jiggle,” which echoes his 1967 song “Red Red Wine” in the part where Mr. Theroux’s Auto-tuned voice sings the words “red, red wine.” The song hit the Spotify viral charts globally last month.So does this mean real money?“I sincerely hope we can all make some jiggle jiggle out of the phenomenon. Or maybe some fold,” Mr. Theroux said. “So far, it’s been more on the jiggle end.”In his career as a documentary filmmaker, Mr. Theroux has explored the worlds of male porn stars, the Church of Scientology, right-wing militia groups, and opioid addicts. In his new BBC series, “Forbidden America,” Mr. Theroux examines the effects of social media on the entertainment industry and politics. Years before Netflix had a hit show centered on Joseph Maldonado-Passage, who is better known as the Tiger King, Mr. Theroux made a film about him. The American documentarian John Wilson, the creator and star of HBO’s “How To With John Wilson,” has cited him as an influence.Now his body of work has been eclipsed, at least temporarily, by “Jiggle Jiggle.” And like many who go viral, Mr. Theroux finds himself trying to understand what just happened and figure out what he’s supposed to do with this newfound cultural capital.“It’s not like I have a catalog and, like, now I can release all of my other novelty rap fragments,” he said. “I’m clearly not going to tour it. ‘Come see Mr. Jiggle himself.’ It would be a 20-second-long gig.” More

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      in Movies

      A Cannes Faux Pas, as Tik Tok Comes to Town.

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      CANNES, France — Shorts made on TikTok haven’t been seen on the big screen in the Grand Théâtre Lumière just yet, but last week the video app was still accused of a Cannes faux pas: attempting to influence a jury’s decisions.In March, TikTok announced that it would be an official partner of the Cannes Film Festival this year. Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s artistic director, was quoted saying that the collaboration was “part of a desire to diversify the audience” of the festival. Billboards that read “ceci n’est pas un film, c’est un vidéo TikTok” loom over the awnings across the street from one of the main movie theaters here.TikTok also announced a competition for short films shot on its app. Although not an official festival event, the competition had a jury headed by the Cambodian-born filmmaker Rithy Panh, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime who has been a regular presence at Cannes with films like “The Missing Picture” and “Exile.”But Panh quit as the jury’s president on Wednesday, he said, two days before the awards were to be given out, only to return to his role on Friday morning, hours before the awards ceremony. Panh said by email that he had quit because TikTok had “seemed to want to influence our decision about prize winners,” and that he returned to his post when the company agreed to respect the jury’s verdict.“Their world, it’s not the art world,” Panh said in an interview later on Friday afternoon, sitting on a couch on the deck of the beachfront restaurant where he and his four fellow jurors had just given out the awards.While declining to name names, Panh said some employees at TikTok had wanted to select different winners from the jury’s short list. It was “multiple people from TikTok,” he said. “One or two were very aggressive, very stubborn, very closed minded.”TikTok issued a statement that seemed to attribute any trouble to ordinary disagreements in selecting winners. “As with any creative competition where the selection of a winner is open to subjective interpretation, there may be differences of artistic opinion from the independent panel of judges,” the statement said.Even after receiving a guarantee that the jury’s choices would be honored, Panh said his first instinct was not to return to the jury. But he said he ultimately came back for the filmmakers. Some, he added, had traveled to Cannes from as far away as Japan or New Zealand. “You just can’t break their dream, you know?”The ceremony on Friday was hosted by the social media personality Terry LTAM, who asked the jurors about their experiences watching the shorts. The Sudanese filmmaker Basma Khalifa said the judging process changed her perspective on the platform. “I didn’t give TikTok enough credit, I don’t think, for how much you can do with it,” she said.Filmmakers from 44 countries submitted films to the competition, all between 30 seconds and three minutes in length. The top prize was shared between two directors: Mabuta Motoki, from Japan, whose film showed a man meticulously building a wooden tub, and Matej Rimanic, a 21-year-old Slovenian director who submitted a comedic black and white short in which two people flirt using a paper airplane. Rimanic said that working on social media platforms had sparked his desire to make movies.“I started posting videos on Vine, then I went to Instagram and then TikTok came around, so I started posting on TikTok,” he said in an interview shortly after he received his award, a gold-colored statuette shaped like TikTok’s logo. “Now during this transition of me posting on videos on social media, I discovered my love for filmmaking.”It was his first time at Cannes, either to attend the festival, or to visit the city. “I hope that one day I can come here with my feature film,” he said. “I only make comedies because the world needs more laughter.” More

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      How ‘Unofficial Bridgerton Musical’ Beat Broadway at the Grammys

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      With their award for “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical,” two musical theater newcomers won against veterans like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Schwartz.When the lyricist-composer duo behind “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” stepped onstage Sunday to accept their Grammy for best musical theater album, the list of people they wanted to thank did not start with a record label or producer, but with their social media followers.“We want to thank everyone on the internet who has watched us create this album from the ground up,” said Abigail Barlow, who sings for over a dozen different characters on the album. “We share this with you.”Last year, Barlow had watched the first season of Netflix’s saucy period drama about the elite marriage market of Regency England, along with millions of others searching for escapist entertainment during the pandemic. A 22-year-old aspiring pop singer with a sizable TikTok following, she posted a song that she wrote with a simple but, she thought, promising premise: “What if ‘Bridgerton’ was a musical?”As the spark of an idea started to build, she sought help from a collaborator, Emily Bear, a 19-year-old composer and musician who had been introduced to the world as a 6-year-old piano prodigy but was hoping to prove herself as more than just a former spectacle for daytime talk shows.The pair started building what would ultimately amount to a 15-song album that includes an amorous duet between the show’s leading couple, a comedic solo for the show’s nonconformist tomboy and an opening number that they wrote with a lavishly dressed Broadway ensemble flitting around the stage in their heads.Bear produced and orchestrated the album herself, using her computer and an electronic keyboard to create the sound of a full symphony orchestra.More Coverage from the 2022 Grammy AwardsThe Irresistible Jon Batiste: The jazz pianist is an inheritor more than an innovator, but he puts the past to use in service of fun.Old, but New: Despite nods to Gen Z, this year’s show favored history-minded performers like Silk Sonic, H.E.R. and Lady Gaga.The Fashion: An exuberant anything-goes attitude was a reminder of why red carpets are fun in the first place.Zelensky’s Speech: Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, addressed the audience in a prerecorded video. Here’s what he said.On Sunday, with about six years of musical-theater writing experience between the two of them, the Gen Z songwriting duo beat out a list of powerhouse Grammy nominees that included Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cinderella”; Conor McPherson’s “Girl From the North Country,” built around Bob Dylan songs; and a Stephen Schwartz musical.“It’s hard to comprehend fully — like, we did this from our bedrooms,” Barlow said in an interview on Monday.“In my head, there was no way this was going to happen,” Bear added. “We just wanted to put out the album for the people that followed the whole process of it.”And there were a lot of those people, weighing in from every corner of the theater-loving internet. Barlow and Bear would livestream their songwriting sessions from Los Angeles, inviting fans to weigh in. Followers shared ideas for staging and choreography, Playbill designs, viral videos of them singing half of a duet and even a pitch to be the show’s intimacy coordinator.Phoebe Dynevor and Regé-Jean Page in Season 1 of “Bridgerton” on Netflix.Liam Daniel/NetflixThe TikTok videos gained approval from Julia Quinn, the author of the “Bridgerton” books that inspired the TV series; the cast members of the show; and Netflix, which gave Barlow and Bear’s lawyers the green light for them to make their songs into an album, the duo said.The original videos remain on TikTok, and the independently produced album is on Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services, but the musical has yet to actually be staged. (This is far from the norm for the musical theater album category, which has typically gone to big-name Broadway musicals such as “Hamilton,” “Jersey Boys” and “The Lion King.”)Speaking on a video call from their hotel rooms in Las Vegas, where the Grammys were held, Barlow, now 23, and Bear, 20, discussed their album’s unanticipated success, their practice of collaborating creatively with fans and where their careers are headed (starting with a Broadway-bound musical that they can’t yet discuss). Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Abigail, what was it about “Bridgerton” that made you want to turn it into a musical?BARLOW The opening scene is so theatrical. I could just see each part of the stage lighting up in my brain. And then I kept writing down lines of dialogue that sounded like song titles. The phrase “ocean away” was the first one that made me run to my piano.Where were you each at before this came into your lives?BARLOW We were both really depressed. It is hard to break into the music industry, and I was ready to give up. I was applying for record-label receptionist jobs and crying to my parents because they had been helping to support me in Los Angeles and they were like, “You need to get a real job. We can’t help you anymore.” It was a really hard decision to try to chase after it just one more time.BEAR We were like, “Did we pick the wrong career?” I feel like we were putting out great music but no one was listening to us, no one was taking us seriously.Then, all of a sudden, you’re creating a musical that’s getting a ton of public engagement and videos that are getting millions of likes on TikTok. That’s one form of approval, but how does it feel getting this form of institutional approval from the Grammys?BEAR The powerful executives follow what the people want. Of course it feels good when someone who brushed you off for the same exact music you were writing two years ago now wants to buy it. But it’s more than that. We want to make way for all of the other incredible female — and not even just female — composers who love their craft.Some artists might bristle at your strategy of inviting in fan feedback as you create the work, leaving it open to significant influence from the audience in the middle of the creative process.BARLOW I’ve been livestreaming while singing and songwriting for an audience since I was a teenager. It’s like a muscle; the more you do it, the better you get at it. Emily has classic training and is incredibly educated in her craft. I am not, so it was just sort of my process to gain an audience’s perspective on what they thought and how I could improve.BEAR If you think about it, it was like we were workshopping instantly. We were getting live feedback in real time for people that would be coming to the show or buying the album.Do you think you’ll continue that way of doing things now that you have this institutional approval?BARLOW We’d love to, but we have some exciting projects after “Bridgerton” gave us a foot in the door and we still have to keep it hush-hush.BEAR Which is totally against our M.O., and it’s a little frustrating because, as we’re writing this music, we want to share it with everyone. What’s better P.R. for a project than getting people on board early? By the time it comes out, they know the music, they feel invested, they were there when it happened.And you did “Bridgerton” without a record label?BARLOW In the beginning when it first started to blow up we had a few conversations with labels, but none of it felt right. We knew that we wanted to capitalize on the moment, and we knew that the faster we released it the better.BEAR We would have gotten an orchestra and a cast, and that would have taken a lot of time and a lot of money. And why sign a label deal and not own all of our masters and publishing? We were like, eh, let’s just put it out ourselves. And I remember the night the album came out and we just saw it climbing the charts. We had fans who were constantly bugging us to release the album, so we knew we would have listeners, but I didn’t quite expect that much.How likely is it that the musical gets staged?BEAR It’s a bit out of our court because we don’t own the I.P. We feel like it would fit perfectly onstage. We see it so clearly. Netflix, you know where to find us. More

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      in Music

      Mitski Is More Than TikTok

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      Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

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      How the ‘Encanto’ Soundtrack Became a Smash

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      With its eighth week at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, the LP featuring songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda is a lesson in how fans drive hits from social media to streaming services.The soundtrack to Disney’s “Encanto” had an inauspicious start on the Billboard 200 album chart, arriving at No. 197 after the animated film’s release in November, just below Bob Seger’s “Greatest Hits” and a Notorious B.I.G. reissue.But this week the soundtrack, featuring songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a score by Germaine Franco, notches its eighth week at No. 1 — one of only three albums with a run this long in the last five years — while Miranda’s song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” slipped to second place on the Hot 100 singles chart after five times at the top.What happened in between is an object lesson in how songs become hits now, with tracks elevated by fans through streaming and social media, and radio often lagging behind the curve.For “Encanto” and “Bruno,” the key factor was TikTok. Soon after the film became available for streaming on Disney+ on Christmas Eve, fans shared their reflections there and acted out scenes from the movie, about an extended family in Colombia that has been touched by magic.“The first instance on TikTok was people posting that these characters look like me and my family, that I’m seeing myself in this picture,” said Ken Bunt, president of the Disney Music Group. “Then it fairly quickly moved into another phase, where people were doing the dances and singing to it.”Explore the World of ‘Encanto’Disney’s new film, about a gifted family in Colombia, pairs stunning animation with spellbinding songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda.Review: “Encanto” charms with its focus on family dynamics, fantastic feats of wizardry and respect for Latino culture, writes our film critic.The Voice of Mirabel: Stephanie Beatriz, who won over fans with her role in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” discusses taking on the lead role in the film.An Enchanting Soundtrack: The film’s album of music recently climbed to the top of the Billboard 200, displacing Adele’s “30.”A Slice of His Homeland: A Times reporter watched “Encanto” with her Colombian father. Here’s what they thought.Once ignited on TikTok — where videos tagged #wedonttalkaboutbruno have been viewed 3.5 billion times — “Bruno” and other soundtrack songs, like “Surface Pressure,” began to dominate Spotify, Apple Music and other audio streaming outlets. The soundtrack ousted Adele’s “30” from No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart in early January and has since held that slot every week but one.Since its release, “Encanto” has had the equivalent of just under one million sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, the tracking service used in compiling Billboard’s charts. This week, “Encanto” tops the rapper Kodak Black’s new “Back for Everything” (No. 2) and albums by Morgan Wallen (No. 3), Gunna (No. 4) and the Weeknd (No. 5).On the singles chart, “Bruno” was replaced at No. 1 by Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves,” a song released nearly two years ago that was resuscitated as a TikTok meme and recently got a fresh boost on the radio.Even with the imprimatur of Miranda, the Tony-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning creator of “Hamilton,” “Encanto” might have seemed a long shot as a mainstream pop hit. The album is a pan-Latin fusion that draws on Colombian folk styles like vallenato and bambuco, with touches of salsa, Broadway bombast and rock en Español.In the past, Disney might have leaned on a Broadway-style ballad, with a globally recognized star singing in English, to propel one of its soundtracks. (Think Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from “The Lion King,” which went to No. 4 in 1994.)“Encanto” flips that playbook, showcasing Colombian stars like Carlos Vives and Sebastián Yatra. “Bruno,” a complex ensemble piece with a classic cha-cha beat, is credited to six of the film’s cast members. “Dos Oruguitas,” the first song Miranda wrote from start to finish in Spanish, is nominated for an Oscar.To record the album, producers brought in Colombian specialists to help bring authenticity to the rhythms and instrumental arrangements; most of the sessions, which took place last year, were conducted remotely.But even with its use of acoustic instruments like the cuatro and the tiple — two relatives of the guitar — the sound of “Encanto” is not as distant from the pop mainstream as it may seem. Mike Elizondo, one of the album’s producers, who has worked with Dr. Dre, Fiona Apple and the band Twenty One Pilots, pointed out the heavy bass that drives songs like “Bruno,” and the presence of synthesizers that would not be out of place on a rap hit.“When we were making the music to the soundtrack, Lin was very encouraging,” Elizondo said in an interview. “‘Let’s not try and water anything down,’” he recalled Miranda saying. “‘Let’s not feel like we have to follow any of the rules of prior soundtracks.’”Even so, “Bruno” was almost entirely absent from radio for most of its ascent. Disney did not begin promoting it to radio stations until late January, Bunt said. In recent weeks, “Bruno” has had fewer than 4,000 spins a week on radio stations. By comparison, in the week that Adele’s “Easy on Me” first reached No. 1, in October, American radio stations played it more than 18,000 times.Videos shared on social media helped contextualize the story behind “Bruno” in a way that radio play never could. TikTok clips show fans enacting the story, while a Disney clip on YouTube translates the lyrics into 21 languages, including Norwegian, Thai and Korean. The latest viral mutation in the success of “Bruno” is mash-ups with Doja Cat or Bruno Mars (get it?).In a sense, those videos capitalize on one of the advantages of any successful soundtrack, from the days of “Saturday Night Fever” to “Frozen,” Disney’s last comparable blockbuster: a story line that links the songs together and lets fans relive the film through its hits. That has become vital in the streaming age, when individual songs are increasingly disconnected from their albums.“They’re like potato chips: you can’t eat just one,” said Gary Trust, Billboard’s senior director of charts. “With ‘Encanto’ songs, you can’t just listen to one. You want to relive the whole story.” More

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      He Makes Justin Bieber and the Bee Gees Go Viral on TikTok

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      Griffin Haddrill is a founder of VRTCL, an agency hired to turn hit songs into memes.Name: Griffin HaddrillAge: 24Hometown: Bozeman, Mont.Currently Lives: In a four-bedroom house in Las Vegas with walls covered in street art.Claim to Fame: Mr. Haddrill is a co-founder of VRTCL, an agency hired by major record labels to make songs go viral on TikTok through remixes, mash-ups, meme-able chorus snippets, creator partnerships and other algorithmic alchemy. “I usually start with the lyric sheet to see if there is maybe a trend we can capitalize on or maybe a creative idea around the beat,” he said. For Lil Nas X’s “Montero,” that meant devil-themed makeup tutorials and interpretive dance routines set to the track. He also works with vintage hits like the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman,” which thanks to his efforts, has been featured in more than 279,000 TikTok videos including sunset selfies, boba tea tutorials and cyst removals. The right music “makes influencers feel part of a cool and cultured moment, and they like showing that off to fans,” he said.Big Break: Mr. Haddrill has always had an ear for music and business. At 12, he handed his father a business plan for high-tech earbuds. At 16, he was a music manager for Gregory Lake, an underground hip-hop artist, and 100Tribn, a D.J. act, while he was completing rehab in Salt Lake City for cocaine addiction. At 20, he dropped out of San Jose State to pursue music management full-time in Las Vegas. In 2019, he and Sean Young, a former influencer on Vine, saw how social media algorithms were starting to mold the habits of young listeners, and founded VRTCL.Latest Project: VRTCL, which Mr. Haddrill said brings in $1 million in monthly revenue and employs 18 people, was acquired in July by Create Music Group, a data-driven music company in Los Angeles. Mr. Haddrill, who is staying on as chief executive, is guarded about the terms of the deal. “With earning potential, the acquisition is in the eight figures,” he said.Next Thing: Mr. Haddrill helped turn “Stay” by Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber and “Best Friend” by Saweetie and Doja Cat into TikTok earworms last year. But his dream client list skews older: Duran Duran, Billy Joel and other cassette-era acts. “One song that I always thought could really blow up again is Cher’s ‘Believe,’” he said.Unlimited Data: He recently hired Conover Wang, a former roommate and software engineer at Reddit, to develop a program to analyze TikTok song data, including views, comments and shares. “The software is really a core part of our business, although it doesn’t have a name yet,” he said. “We should probably call it something cool.” More

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      What We Forgot to Talk About in 2021

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherTaylor, Drake, Olivia, Adele, Billie, Lil Nas X, Sondheim, Kanye, Kacey: Popcast has covered them all in the past 12 months. In the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, pop music returned to something like normal, with big stars releasing albums and returning to the road (at least for now). There was quite a lot to talk about.On this week’s Popcast, a loose round table about some of the year’s musical high points that haven’t yet been discussed on the show: the global breakthrough of Maneskin, the ascendance of Jazmine Sullivan, the resilience of Kelly Clarkson, some left field TikTok high points and the musical stylings of Candiace Dillard of “The Real Housewives of Potomac.”Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

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      TikTok Made Them Famous. Figuring Out What’s Next Is Tough.

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      Before Charli D’Amelio became the most popular creator on TikTok — she currently has 132 million followers — she danced on the competitive contemporary-dance circuit in the Northeast, the sorts of theatrical styles you might know from “So You Think You Can Dance?” Once she began posting to TikTok in 2019, and especially after her videos began taking off and her family moved to Los Angeles to support the viral dreams of her and her older sister, Dixie (56 million followers), that sort of dance became an afterthought, a relic of an old life.The D’Amelios made a leap from the phone screen to the small screen this year with the Hulu docuseries “The D’Amelio Show,” which captures, in sometimes excruciating detail, the thrills and the wages of TikTok success. Its most curious subplot is about Charli’s side quest to return, at least temporarily, to her precapitalist self, squeezing in time to work with a coach to relearn what those old dances require of her body, and pushing herself to remaster them.For Charli, TikTok stardom is a rocket ship, and potentially a ceiling, too. The past year or so has been a kind of testing ground for what the app’s biggest creators — the D’Amelio sisters, Noah Beck (32 million followers), Chase Hudson (32 million followers), Addison Rae (86 million followers) and others — might do next, either voluntarily and enthusiastically, or simply to satisfy the insatiable maw of demand that their sheer existence occasions.It’s been a mixed bag, a chaotic blend of behind-the-scenes vulnerability, eager-to-please willingness, bro impudence and performed resistance. Navigating the chasm between the instinctual charisma that fuels the app and the long(er) form seriousness and vision that might make for a stable, sustainable career in entertainment has been playing out across reality television, pop music, film, books, other social media platforms — and even TikTok itself.What’s become clear is that the skill set that led to big-tent triumph on the app in 2019 and 2020 is, by and large, sized to the medium. Given more room to breathe in other formats, most of TikTok’s superstars are still figuring out how to create beyond the phone.Throughout many of these projects, what you sense is the offscreen number-crunchers hoping to hang potential franchises on the heads and necks of these young people, who are less fully formed creative thinkers than fan-aggregation platforms in desperate need of content.“Noah Beck Tries Things,” which appears on AwesomenessTV’s YouTube channel, is the ne plus ultra of this phenomenon — an entire series, two seasons deep, wholly devoted to figuring out what to do with this uncooked meal of a man.Beck, 20, is a deeply affable former soccer player who, of all of the current crop of TikTok crossover stars, appears most baffled about how to amplify it. “Noah Beck Tries Things” is a slapdash trifle of consequence-free content production. It simply winds Beck up, places him in unlikely scenarios — cooking a steak, dancing the tango, recording a dis track — and watches him gulp for air. In one episode, when someone shows him how to do a handstand on a hoverboard, his awe is genuine — not the practiced “gosh!” of someone used to being filmed for reactions, but more like the off-the-cuff “derp” of someone who understands he has landed somewhere near the deep end and has no idea how to swim.On his show, he’s mostly hapless, apart from the occasional athletic task. But what’s emerging as his calling card is his almost raging commitment to goodnaturedness. The only times Beck’s brow ever genuinely furrows are in scenes in the D’Amelios’ Hulu show when Dixie, his girlfriend — she refers to him as a “golden retriever,” a familiar TikTok good-boy archetype — can’t quite muster the optics of a reciprocative relationship. In those moments, he looks frazzled, as if an Apple IIc is being updated with this year’s operating system.Beck is genial and gentle — in short bursts on the app, he’s a palliative. But he never seems truly hungry. In stark contrast to that approach stands Addison Rae, or rather, revs Addison Rae. Of this generation of TikTok stars, she is the most intentional, the most iron-willed, the most determined. Off camera, she has been loosely adopted into the Kourtney Kardashian orbit. Her parents have been game TikTokers. (The D’Amelios play along, too, but much less so.) Even when Rae, 21, was focused more intently on her social media presentation — she’s now often comically late to trends on the app — she always appeared to have her eyes somewhere beyond the phone.Unsurprisingly, Rae’s star turn in “He’s All That,” the updating of the 1999 teen rom-com “She’s All That” (itself an update of “Pygmalion”/“My Fair Lady”) is the most vivid post-TikTok performance of the year. That’s because Rae understands viral stardom not just as a job, but as an archetype.Like “The D’Amelio Show,” “He’s All That” is a metacommentary about the falsity of viral fame, albeit fictionalized. Rae plays Padgett (pronounced, more or less, “pageant”), a social media influencer falsifying her bona fides. After a fall from grace, she sets about remaking a surly outcast classmate (who wears a G.G. Allin T-shirt) as her new hottie. High jinks ensue, followed by love.Beauty and popularity are inventions, and have been long before TikTok came along. “He’s All That” plays those constructions for chuckles and awws. And the end of the film savvily mimics the turn away from polished inaccessibility toward Emma Chamberlain-type relatability. Padgett returns to social media, but posting more naturalistic photos, taken by her new paramour: She found herself an Instagram boyfriend after all.“He’s All That” still valorizes and reinforces Big Algorithm, even converting the punk skeptic. But the some of the young men who thrived on the app in 2020 decided to pivot in the opposite direction: refusenik. Most notably, this has been the direction taken by two stars trying to transition into music careers — Chase Hudson, 19, who records music as Lilhuddy, and Jaden Hossler, 20, who records music as jxdn.Unlike Rae, who this year released a peppy club pop single, “Obsessed,” a perfectly textureless workout anthem, Hudson and Hossler (nine million followers) swerved hard into dissident territory, embracing pop-punk and, in places, the grittier textures that emerged from SoundCloud in the late 2010s. They’re heavily tattooed, wear haute mall-goth clothing and paint their fingernails — their pushback against TikTok’s centrism is highly aestheticized (as opposed to, say, Bryce Hall, he of the Covid-era partying, drug arrest and boxing match, whose post-TikTok direction seems inspired by Jake Paul).For creators determined to make it clear they are not bound by TikTok’s cutesy videos and algorithm, it is a purposeful choice. Hossler’s debut album, “Tell Me About Tomorrow,” traverses anxiety and addiction. He has a reedy voice, and when he’s singing self-lacerating lines like “I don’t like taking pills, but I took ’em anyway,” he still sounds like an accessible teddy bear, albeit one whose stuffing is coming undone.By contrast, Hudson comes off as if he’s spoiling for a fight on his debut album, “Teenage Heartbreak.” He’s a sneerer: “I’m not sorry that I crashed your party.” In “Downfalls High,” the surprisingly puckish long-form music video-film that accompanies Machine Gun Kelly’s latest album “Tickets to My Downfall,” Hudson plays Fenix, a ghoulish loner with punk charisma — basically, the kind of guy Padgett tries to clean up in “He’s All That.” When his girlfriend, who is popular and rich and slumming it, asks him what he wants to be when he grows up, he replies sullenly but not terribly convincingly, “Dead.” It all feels like one long elaborate Halloween performance. (Hudson is also one of several TikTokers featured in the long-simmering reality show “Hype House,” which will have its premiere on Netflix next month.)Hudson’s and Hossler’s albums kill two urges with one groan: the need for these TikTokers to find a viable path forward in music, and the music industry’s need to amplify and reinforce the still-emergent revival of pop-punk, the music of white rebellion most readily available to new arrivals with little history or experience.Given the apparent craving for safe spaces, it’s notable how, on both “The D’Amelio Show” and in “He’s All That,” nonwhite characters are deployed as foils who are far more knowing and worldly than the white protagonists. Deliberately or not, they serve as reminders that the world beyond the app is far more diverse and complex. “Noah Beck Tries Things” undertakes a version of this as well with queer collaborators, striking given that one of the most frequent critiques of Beck during his rise has been of queerbaiting. (That said, the show’s first episode, where Beck learned how to apply makeup from James Charles, appears to have disappeared from the internet.)This year TikTok stars tried their hands at Hulu shows, streaming series and music careers.Simoul AlvaIt’s tough to know how purposeful these indictments about privilege are — they generally serve the narratives of the shows while reifying their stars, who are presented as being open to personal growth.“The D’Amelio Show,” however, often comes off as quietly ruthless toward its stars, whether in its array of more-experienced secondary characters, its lingering on the excruciating challenges of growing up in public on the internet, or even in the fish-out-of-water talking head shots juxtaposing the relentlessly normal family members against their relentlessly grand Southern California mansion.Ultimately, “The D’Amelio Show” is about the toxicity of viral fame and also about child labor. (Charli is 17 now, and was 15 and 16 when the show was taping. Dixie is 20.) It is presented as a moral victory, near the end of the season, when after a period of deep decompression by Charli, it is determined that she will only work three days a week, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.On TikTok, though, life itself is labor. You feel that burden perhaps most acutely in how Dixie navigates the fame that has arrived at her feet in the wake of Charli’s breakthrough. Dixie is older, a little more cynical and a lot less comfortable. For her next step, she chooses music, and the show captures, with discomfiting intimacy, just how challenging that decision is, artistically and emotionally. Her voice is rough, her confidence is low and she is besieged by online naysayers. (The persistent Greek chorus of negative online comments, represented on the show in on-screen pop-up graphics, is both effective and perverse.) Her worldview is encapsulated in the opening lines of her first single, “Be Happy”: “Sometimes I don’t want to be happy/Don’t hold it against me/If I’m down just leave me there, let me be sad.”Perhaps this heartbreaking transparency will be the ultimate legacy of this era of TikTok crossover. It’s there in Charli’s book “Essentially Charli: The Ultimate Guide to Keeping It Real,” which came out in late 2020, which juxtaposes workbook-esque pages about friendship and style with confessions about anxiety and therapy. (An even more involved discussion of this fundamental viral-stardom tension is in “Backstory: My Life So Far,” the memoir of the TikTok superstar Avani Gregg, 19, a close friend of Charli’s (38 million followers). Gregg’s book is striking for its matter-of fact-conversations about self-doubt and mental health.)Charli’s anxiety is a recurrent topic on “The D’Amelio Show,” which can often feel like crisis footage: Charli having a panic attack in the car when she spies paparazzi waiting for her, or Dixie breaking down after being bullied online.But Charli’s most revealing content may well be in the form of her secondary TikTok account, @user4350486101671, which she began in April, during a trip to Las Vegas for, of all things, a Jake Paul boxing match. It has a mere 15 million followers, and Charli treats it far more casually. The videos are in general looser than those on her main account, with a broader range of emotions, from exuberance to exasperation. The dancing is a little smoother, a little less performed.Sometimes the gap between the two accounts is as vast as the one between burden and freedom, and sometimes it’s just enough for her to zestily lean into lip-syncing a curse word that might not fly on her main account. She might owe the most commodified version of herself to TikTok, but here she’s trying on different selves, and in nearly every video, her smile is broad and relaxed. She looks like someone fully at home. More