WASHINGTON - One of the hottest tracks on TikTok this summer is, unexpectedly, a 22-second Petey Pablo hip-hop beat remixed with a years-old audio clip of Mr J.D. Vance – now former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick – declaring, before his loyalties changed, that he was “a never Trump guy”.
The song has been used in more than 8,500 TikTok videos since two independent music producers created it in July. Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris have seized on it, wagging their fingers and swinging their arms to it, some hoping to create its official dance. It was also reposted by @KamalaHQ, the campaign’s official TikTok account. Videos with the sound have racked up more than 40 million views overall, according to Zelf, a social video analytics company focused on TikTok.
It’s a marquee example of a new genre of political memes finding an audience on the short-form video app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
Politically minded Americans are increasingly embracing TikTok to make videos and trends out of snippets of songs and speeches in this election cycle. The app – a pandemic-fueled curiosity during the last presidential election – has since exploded its user base to 170 million Americans. About half of users younger than 30 say they use TikTok to help them keep up with politics and political issues, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.
“People are still doing dances to random songs, but now people are doing dances to remixes of rap with Kamala Harris speeches over it,” said Ms Emma Mont, a digital creator and administrator of @OrganizerMemes, a liberal meme account.
While TikTok prohibits political advertising, unpaid political content is thriving on the platform – Mr Vance, Trump, Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, each had verified accounts there as of last week. Users have also flocked to a remix of Harris quoting her mother in a speech last year, saying, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” and laughing, and to a clip that starts with Harris speaking and ends with a hip-hop song repeating, “Trump 2024”.
Mr Seth Schuster, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said the team was tapping into viral trends both to “bring the conversation about the stakes of this election to the places a lot of our voters are getting their news from” and to expand its supporter network.
In response to the TikTok video, Ms Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Mr Vance, said: “Cringe.”
Song snippets and catchphrases from pop culture are a core part of using TikTok. Users can select from a library of popular sounds when they make TikToks and search for songs and sounds related to topics that they’re interested in. Searching “Trump” or “Kamala” in the app’s sounds yields dozens of results, which have been used in tens of thousands of videos.
If users like a particular sound, TikTok is likely to serve them additional videos that include it – which is how it can seem that the entire internet is suddenly using a phrase like “very demure, very mindful.” (That meme sprang from a TikTok creator’s playful descriptions of how to behave in a variety of places, from work to drag shows.)
The “never Trump guy” song was created by Mr Carl Dixon and Mr Steve Terrell, two 34-year-old music producers with a company called House of Evo. They regularly make sounds on TikTok, including a popular remix of an evangelical sermon about margaritas last year, but they hadn’t dabbled much in politics until now.
Mr Dixon, also known as Casa Di, and Mr Terrell saw the footage of Mr Vance’s comments in a post on the Harris campaign’s TikTok account that compared them with newer footage of him expressing support for Trump.
The two found Mr Vance’s manner of speech “sort of melodic in a sense,” Mr Terrell said. Mr Dixon said, “We were like, what if we put this to a catchy beat or something?” The process took the pair under three hours, they said.
Their video started with footage of a member of the Harris campaign staff saying, “So this is really who Donald Trump chose as his running mate?” A different voice then says, “Drop the beat,” after which a sample of Petey Pablo’s “Freek-a-Leek” plays, remixed with Mr Vance saying, “I’m a never Trump guy” and “I never liked him.”
“When Kamala decided to start running, me and Steve were figuring out ways to encourage people to vote or be aware of what’s going on,” Mr Dixon said. “This is our first time doing something as politically charged,” he added.
Sounds like this one allow people to profess their political opinions, or share what they view as the stakes of the election, without having to formally expound on their beliefs, Mr Terrell said.
TikTok is one of the few social media sites showing a sharp increase “in the percent of adults getting news there and an increase in just the newsiness of the platform,” said Ms Elisa Shearer, a senior researcher at Pew. “A lot of that is opinion- and humor-based,” she added.
Ms Sasha Khatami, a 24-year-old digital marketing coordinator from Alexandria, Virginia, said she had come across the song while browsing popular sounds on TikTok in July, soon after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
“Sounds are the number-one way to express your opinions,” Ms Khatami said. “I don’t think people are sharing their feelings anymore. I think they’re making TikTok sounds and TikTok dances.”
Ms Khatami, who said her earlier videos on TikTok typically received between 300 and 1,000 views, made up a dance to the “never Trump guy” song – and was startled and thrilled to see her post rack up hundreds of thousands of views as TikTok’s algorithm served it to other users.
Since then, she has performed the dance in front of iconic locations in the nation’s capital, including the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, and has been tickled to see other TikTok users perform their own version of her shimmy.
While Ms Khatami has been enjoying her newfound success on TikTok, she has been surprised by the volume of angry comments from supporters of Trump and Mr Vance on many of her videos. She said she had sought to “turn that backlash into motivation,” like when a commenter declared, “Can we find this ladies dad so he can teach her about what the consequences are for what she’s doing?”
She put text from that comment onto a separate TikTok featuring her father and boyfriend, who had also learned the dance, posting it with the caption: “My dad is a never Trump guy.”
Ms Khatami, who recently made her first political donation to Harris, said she planned to canvas soon, too.
“I feel so inspired by her campaign and what her being president could mean that I feel like I have to get more involved,” she said. NYTIMES
