The Briefing Room
General Category => Sports/Entertainment/MSM/Social Media => Topic started by: jmyrlefuller on May 22, 2021, 04:46:52 pm
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by Rebecca Jennings
May 18, 2021
It’s curious, then, that TikTok’s biggest breakout stars are not the musical theatre belters, nor the hip-hop choreographers, or the rhythmic gymnasts. Much like at an actual high school talent show, the biggest stars are the popular kids.
What I’m talking about here is “straight TikTok,” the side of the app that can be described as “pretty people filming themselves being pretty.” On straight TikTok, you can be an okay dancer with an expressive face, and one year later, you get a beauty brand, a publicist-concocted friendship with a Kardashian, and the starring role in the gender-swapped Netflix adaptation of She’s All That. You can land a guest spot on the Tonight Show, perform the TikTok dances that made you famous, receive tons of backlash for not crediting the original choreographers, and emerge mostly unscathed, because to criticize you for “not having talent” or piggybacking on the creations of others is to miss the point entirely: No one follows you because they expect you to be talented. They follow you because they like you.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/5/18/22440937/tiktok-addison-rae-bella-poarch-build-a-bitch-charli-damelio-mediocrity