Happy Nice Mall

Previous Charlie D’Amelio He became the most popular creator on TikTok – he now has 132 million followers – dancing on the competitive contemporary dance floor in the Northeast, “So You Think You Can Dance?” When she started posting on TikTok in 2019, and especially after her videos started posting and her family moved to Los Angeles to support her and her older sister’s viral dreams, dixie (56 million followers), this kind of dance came to mind as an afterthought, a remnant of an old life.

D’Amelios made the leap from phone screen to small screen this year with Hulu documentaries.”The D’Amelio ShowCapturing the excitement and tolls of TikTok success in sometimes irresistible detail”. Its most interesting subplot concerns Charli’s quest to return to her pre-capitalist self, at least temporarily, squeezing out time to work with a coach to relearn what those old dances wanted from her body, forcing them to re-master.

For Charli, TikTok stardom is a rocket ship and potentially a ceiling. Last year, the D’Amelio brothers, the app’s biggest creators, Noah Beck (32 million followers), Chase Hudson (32 million followers), Addison Rae (86 million followers) and others—either voluntarily and enthusiastically, or later, simply to satisfy the insatiable demand that their very existence demands.

It’s been a mixed bag, a chaotic mix of behind-the-scenes vulnerability, willingness to please, sibling resentment, and resistance on display. Navigating the chasm between the instinctive charisma that fuels the app and the long(er) form seriousness and vision for a stable, sustainable career in entertainment is evident in reality television, pop music, film, books, and other social media. platforms – and even TikTok itself.

What does become clear is that the skill set that led to a major victory in practice in 2019 and 2020 was generally medium in size. Given more room to breathe in other formats, many of TikTok’s superstars are still trying to figure out how to create beyond the phone.

You feel like a lot of these projects are just scraps of off-screen numbers hoping to hang potential franchises over the heads and necks of these youngsters who are less fully formed creative thinkers than fanbase platforms that desperately need content.

“Noah Beck Tries Things” Appearing on AwesomenessTV’s YouTube channel, what’s the plus ultra of this phenomenon – a two-season series devoted entirely to figuring out what one man will do with this uncooked meal.

Of all the current crop of TikTok cross-stars, 20-year-old Beck is an extremely friendly former football player who seems most confused about how to raise him. “Noah Beck Can’t Try Something” is a quick trivia of fruitless content production. This just excites Beck, puts him in unexpected scenarios – cooking a steak, dancing the tango, recording a disc piece – and watching him swallow for breath. In one episode, when someone shows him how to do a handstand on a hoverboard, his admiration is real, the customary “God!” not. It’s the story of someone who used to be filmed for backlash, but more like the uncuffed “derp” of someone who realizes they’ve landed near the deep end and has no idea how to swim.

In his show, he is mostly unlucky except for occasional athletic duties. But what emerges as his calling card is his almost raging devotion to good nature. The only scenes where Beck really frowns in scenes on D’Amelios’ Hulu show are when his girlfriend Dixie—who refers to him as a “golden retriever,” a familiar TikTok good boy archetype—is the optic of a mutual relationship. In those moments, it looks exhausted, as if an Apple IIc is being updated with this year’s operating system.

Beck is friendly and kind – with short intervals in practice, he’s a palliative. But he never seems really hungry. In stark contrast to this approach, Addison Rae is overthrowing Addison Rae. He is the most purposeful, the most determined, the most determined of this generation of TikTok stars. Off camera, Kourtney Kardashian has been loosely accepted into her orbit. His family has been gaming TikTokers. (The D’Amelios go with it, too, but much less.) Even when 21-year-old Rae focused more carefully on her social media presentation—now often hilariously late to app trends—her eyes were always somewhere beyond the phone.

Not surprisingly, Rae’s stellar return in 1999’s teen romantic comedy “She’s All That” (herself an update of “Pygmalion”/”My Fair Lady”) update “He’s All That” is her most live performance post-TikTok. year. This is because Rae understands viral stardom as an archetype, not just a job.

Like “The D’Amelio Show,” “He’s All That” is an overarching commentary on the falseness of viral fame, though fictional. Rae plays Padgett (pronounced “show”), a social media phenomenon who falsifies her goodwill. After falling out of favor, she sets out to remake a sullen, outcast classmate (who wears a GG Allin shirt) as her new hottie. Loud jokes, followed by love.

Beauty and popularity are inventions, and it was long before TikTok came along. “He’s All That” plays these structures for giggles and awws. And the film’s ending deftly mimics the transition from polished inaccessibility to Emma Chamberlain-style associativeness. Padgett is returning to social media, but posting more natural photos taken by her new boyfriend: boyfriend Finally.

“He’s All That” still evaluates and amplifies the Great Algorithm, even transforming the punk skeptic. But in 2020, some young men who were successful in practice decided to go the opposite direction: residual. Most importantly, this has been the trajectory of the two stars trying to transition into their music careers – Chase Hudson, 19, who recorded the music as Lilhuddy, and Jaden Hossler, 20, who recorded the music as jxdn.

Unlike Rae, who released a peppy club pop single this year, “Obsessed,” the perfect no-double workout anthem, Hudson and Hossler (nine million followers) diverged sharply into oppositional territory, embracing pop-punk and, in places, the bolder textures that emerged from SoundCloud in the late 2010s. They have heavy tattoos, wear haute mall goth outfits, and paint their nails – their reaction to TikTok’s centrism is highly aestheticized (as opposed to Bryce Hall, for example, the representative of Covid-era parties, drug confinement, and boxing matches). The post TikTok direction seems to be inspired by Jake Paul).

It’s the go-to choice for creators who are determined to make it clear that they’re not tied to TikTok’s cutesy videos and algorithm. Hossler’s debut album “Tell Me About Tomorrow” goes over anxiety and addiction. He has a high-pitched voice and continues to sound like a teddy bear dissolving stuffing as he sings self-destruct lines like “I don’t like taking pills but I took them anyway.”

In contrast, Hudson sounds like he’s breaking up a fight on his debut album, “Teenage Heartbreak.” He is sarcastic: “I’m not sorry I ruined your party.” In “Collapses High” Hudson, the surprisingly undersized long-form music video accompanying Machine Gun Kelly’s latest album “Tickets to My Downfall,” plays Fenix, a fearsome loner with punk charisma – basically, what Padgett is trying to clean up in “He’s All.” kind of man. He’s the one who’s popular and rich.” When his raucous, popular girlfriend asks him what he wants to be when he grows up, he replies sullenly but not very convincingly, “Dead.” It all feels like a long, elaborate Halloween performance. (Hudson also has a long-running It is one of the few TikTokers featured in the reality show. “Sleep House” will premiere on Netflix next month.)

Hudson and Hossler’s albums kill two impulses with one groan: These TikTokers’ need to find a viable way forward in music, and the music industry’s need to strengthen and strengthen the still emerging revival of pop-punk, most white rebel music. ready for newcomers with little background or experience.

Given the obvious longing for safe spaces, it is notable that in both “The D’Amelio Show” and “He’s All That,” non-white characters are deployed as foils that are far more knowledgeable and mundane than white heroes. Intentionally or not, they remind us that the world beyond practice is much more diverse and complex. “Noah Beck Can’t Try Something” takes on a version of this, along with queer collaborators, one of his most frequent criticisms of Beck’s rise. queerbaiting. (However, the first episode of the show where Beck learns about makeup from James Charles seems to have disappeared from the internet.)

It’s hard to know how purposeful these indictments of privilege are—they often serve the shows’ narratives while embodying their stars, who are presented as open to personal growth.

However, “The D’Amelio Show” often comes off as quietly ruthless towards its stars, whether it’s in the more seasoned cast of protagonists, stuck with the agonizing challenges of growing up online, or online or even online. Fish-out-of-water talking head shots that relentlessly juxtapose normal family members with grand Southern California mansions.

In conclusion, “The D’Amelio Show” is about the toxicity of viral fame, as well as child labor. (Charli is now 17, and was 15 and 16 when the show was filmed. Dixie is 20.) Near the end of the season, it is presented as a moral victory when set by Charli after a period of deep decompression. It will work only three days a week, from 11:00 to 16:00.

In TikTok, life itself is labor. You feel this burden perhaps most acutely in how Dixie manages the fame that has come after Charli’s breakthrough. Dixie is older, a little more sarcastic, and a lot less relaxed. She chooses music for her next step, and the show captures with a disturbing candor just how artistically and emotionally challenging this decision was. His voice is rude, he has low self-esteem and is surrounded by dissenters online. (The persistent Greek chorus of negative online comments represented in the show by on-screen pop-up graphics are both influential and perverse.) His worldview is summed up in the opening lines of his first single, “Be Happy”: “Sometimes I don’t want to be happy/Don’t hold it against me/If I get tired Leave me there, I’ll be sad.”

Perhaps this heartbreaking transparency will be the ultimate legacy of this TikTok transition period. It’s in Charli’s book “Actually Charli: The Ultimate Guide to Keeping it Real” Released in late 2020, which juxtaposes workbook-like pages on friendship and style with confessions about anxiety and therapy. (An even more in-depth discussion of this essential viral stardom thriller, “Story: My Life So Far” 19-year-old TikTok superstar Avani Gregg, who is Charli’s close friend (38 million followers). Gregg’s book is notable for its genuine talk of self-doubt and mental health.)

Charli’s anxiety is a recurring theme in “The D’Amelio Show” that can often feel like crisis footage: Charli has a panic attack in the car when she watches the paparazzi waiting for her, or Dixie’s devastation after being bullied online.

But Charli’s most revealing content may be in the form of her secondary TikTok account. @user4350486101671It started in April, during a trip to Las Vegas for a Jake Paul boxing match. He has only 15 million followers and Charli is much more indifferent to him. The videos are generally looser than those on her main account and have a wider range of emotions, from enthusiasm to anger. Dance a little softer, a little less carried out.

Sometimes the gap between the two accounts is as big as the gap between burden and freedom, and sometimes it’s enough for him to happily bend over to lip-sync a damn word that can’t fly on his main account. He may owe his most commodified version of himself to TikTok, but he’s experimenting with different selves here and his smile is wide and relaxed in nearly every video. Seems like someone totally at home.