“The Wellerman”
Today I want to break up the more serious series of posts on things worth remembering with a fun spotlight on a thing worth noticing—even at the risk of putting myself well behind the digital curve by blogging about something from TikTok. (Oh dear.)
Once a social media meme has made it to primetime tv and mainstream news outlets it's not that fresh any more, but this particular one is just so fun and wholesome that if you haven't heard it, you owe it to yourself to join the crew:
Commentators across platforms have been exclaiming over how perfect the sea shanty trend is right now. For example:
Sea shanties make so much sense for this moment . . . they are unifying, survivalist songs, designed to transform a huge group of people into one collective body, all working together to keep the ship afloat. (Vulture)
Representing the loyal opposition, Rebecca Jennings at Vox complains that there's nothing special about sea shanties compared to any of the other "heartwarming" trends that could and have emerged out of TikTok. Fun as sea shanties are they're just another algorithm-driven bit of viral content. "There is literally nothing to explain at all."
Adam Neely disagrees.
I've been watching . . . listening? viewing? . . . Adam Neely's video essays on YouTube for a while now, where he analyzes music and music culture with pedagogical flair, mastery of the medium, and just the right combination of wry humour and self-deprecation. They're thoughtful, well-researched, and enormously engaging video essays. On Tuesday he plunged into the latest TikTok trend, diving past the memes into the argument that, beyond the "unifying," "heartwarming" wholesomeness of a communal music project, the success of this particular trend is driven by the call-and-response structure of sea shanties which makes them uniquely well-suited to TikTok's duet feature. It turns out that there IS something to explain, including the musicality of work songs and the relationship between black gospel music and sea shanties:
The advent of the internet unleashed an explosive power of self-publishing, but the utopian ideal of universal access to creative platforms was swamped by the sheer volume of content. Ever since, internet denizens (why did The Internet help make "denizens" a thing again?) and corporations have been struggling to curate all that stuff; recent high-profile arguments over who gets to be on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Web Services, and more have showcased the power that those gatekeeper corporations have.
Instead of elite cultural critics driving creative content towards difficulty to justify their interpretive work, the result is influencers creating ecosystems of increasingly niche content driven by the need to stand out. (Check out Hank Green's "Influencers and Insurrectionists," worth a 3m58s detour to YouTube.) Corporations and influencers don't have ALL the power, though: people are still creating artful things, bending digital media into new or very old configurations.
When something like "The Wellerman" trend rises to the top of social media, not only is it worth asking where it came from, there's a hopefulness in asking the question at all. There may be something genuinely worth explaining, a quirk of new media or glimpse of old art, and behind it all a real human being. In this case, there was! A Scottish postman.
shared by a friend on social media, attribution unknown
CODA.
Séan "Shantyman" McCann and the legendary Newfie band Great Big Sea have been singing sea shanties and "shanty-adjacent" songs as part of a quiet, determined East Coast folk song movement for years. Check out this lovely series of live performances by various artists on location across the Maritimes!
