Music in the time of TikTok: the success of accelerated songs

One of the signs that we live in a hectic age is the extraordinary and in some ways unpredictable success of the accelerated songs, #spedup. They are the usual songs we know but remixed by increasing the speed.

A local example is “I love you baby” by Jovanotti: the result is alienating, a shrill voice comes out to Jovanotti, a bit like when you played a 33 rpm record at 45 rpm (but this comparison if you are under 40 years old you can’t understand it). It is not a new phenomenon: twenty years ago there was a Norwegian group that accelerated songs to dance, and since it had some success, this practice is still called after the Norwegian duo, Nightcore. But it has always been a niche thing, which concerned dance, while now with social media it has exploded: on TikTok the videos related to this theme have totaled 10 billion views, and Spotify has dedicated playlists where you can find the songs that go for the greater but accelerate.

It is music “at the time of TikTok” and this does not seem to displease the record market which thus finds new sources of income: it happens that if a song is not having the desired success, it is relaunched in a #spedup version and maybe it works because it buys more energy.

The accelerated version of the songs goes in the same direction as the accelerated voice messages, or the accelerated videos. We live as if we never had time and as if over time we had to compress more things, in this case notes. It is no coincidence that long books or long films start with a strong handicap: we don’t have all that time, today War and Peace and Gone With the Wind would not have the success they had.

I don’t think it is possible to counter this trend, and perhaps it doesn’t even make sense to do so; but in this way we lose the richness of slowness, of things expected and savored, of time empty of bytes but full of life.