I need to preface this entire piece of unrefined literature with a statement of fact, I fucking hate Tik Tok. Out of all the things to come out of 2020 this is the second worst thing next to a global pandemic. Hours upon hours I watched my girlfriend, coworkers, friends, get lost in rabbit hole of a simple up swipe. I know, there were a few funny ones here and there of course, I’m not a 74 year old grandpa yelling get off my lawn, it just seemed to me like the payout to the amount of videos consumed vs the amount that were actually good wasn’t there for me. I’d honestly rather let someone else do the leg work for me and reap the benefits when they find a good one in this particular area of the internet or wait until it eventually hits Reddit and Instagram. Which reminds me as I write this, remember when the United States tried to ban Tik Tok? Yea that was a thing that happened. History will look back on 2020 and say “yup not really sure what happened there”, but that’s a talk for another time.
Fast forward to February 2021. COVID-19 is still a thing, so much for that two weeks huh? Anyway that’s a topic for another time…did I say that already? Like I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, it’s February of 2021. Tik Tok didn’t get banned and millions upon millions are still taking deep dives on the reg (that’s on the regular for those of you that don’t know, see I’m hip). My girlfriend and I are enjoying a Friday night in, well mostly because there’s nothing else to do and our state (cough cough New Jersey) is still shutdown for the most part. It’s then, right before my girlfriend decides to jump into a game of Dark Souls with a friend who just discovered the game, I hear a sound coming from her phone.
“My Mother told me someday I will buy…”, I immediately looked up. That voice. It was amazing. It hit me like a freight train. Now hold that thought for a paragraph or two, I promise we’ll come back to it, but I need to make another statement of fact. There have rarely ever been moments in my life where music has touched me in the way this one did. I enjoy music, don’t get me wrong I will listen to almost anything with a beat and some good lyrics, but not like this. Off the top of my head 4 songs have stopped me dead in my tracks the first time I had ever heard them and for those songs, for those 3 to 4 minutes, I am entranced to this very day unable to skip them when they happen to mosey their way into a full song library shuffle. Pentatonix singing Hallelujah, Amazing Grace, or Hello Darkness My Old Friend, and Celine Dione’s Ashes are mystifying. Yea that’s right Celine Dione, I said it and I will absolutely die on that hill.
You get the point, this doesn’t happen to me often, let alone enough for me to write about it but hey we’re trying new things. The song in question was being sung on Tik Tok by a user named Nati Dredd. It was haunting, it was captivating, the execution immediately putting any other version to shame. After seeing my interest pique my girlfriend looked at me and says “oh there’s a better version”. A WHAT?! A BETTER VERSION?! She quickly tapped her screen, and before I knew what’s what, I’m watching the same video again only this time a young man joins in, adding his voice to this already entrancing song. Then to top it off a third individual joins adding all sorts of musical instruments on top of it! I mean this guy was playing multiple instruments using multiple duets to flesh this little piece of art to its’ maximum potential. This 2 minute video was one of the most addicting things I had ever gotten my hands on. I needed to hear more.
“Oh that’s a duet that’s always been there”, is what you’re probably saying to yourself, and before Gen Z comes at me with pitchforks or worse, calls me a boomer, I know the duet option exists but I’m going to get into why this is different than how I usually see it used in a second just bear with me. I listened to that 2 minute gem approximately 20 times, each time getting lost in the tones, and after my girlfriend was fed up with having to hear the same melody again and again she dropped a bombshell, “go to youtube and search “The Wellerman” mix”.
If Nati Dredd hit me like a freight train, Nathan Evans singing The Wellerman hit me like one of the glitched out planes in GTA San Andreas, I never saw it coming. He absolutely crushed this song, and by the way I’ve failed to mention that both of these songs are sea shanties. That’s right, those ancient tunes barely remembered unless you’re playing Assassins Creed Black Flag nowadays and even then, it’s not something you can just drop at karaoke and expect people to sing along to. Now I’m a sucker for a good sea shanty if it matches the tones and rhythms I like, but I’m not one to go “Hey DJ play that old ass sea shanty!”. There’s no defined rhythm, tone, or background music in a normal sea shanty and whoever decides to take one on can sing it anyway they choose. It’s artistic freedom to make it your own.
I got a little off topic there, back to Nathan, who again absolutely hammered this song on his own. His voice is exactly what you’d expect to hear when one sings a shanty on the high seas, the rhythm was perfect, and the overall combination of voice and beat was incredibly catchy, again it got better. I don’t know when this snippet got big and I’m probably behind the curve when it comes to Tik Tok trends since I don’t use the app and refuse to and frankly, I’m really surprised I even caught it at all being that we as a society eat trends for breakfast and shit them out by lunch, but dam am I happy I found this one. The edit I watched had been stitched together using various duets from Tik Tok, and with each new person, each new addition, the song became more and more enveloping.
I must have listened to that on repeat for an hour, trying to pinpoint each new person’s voice so I could hear the individuals amongst the whole. This then started a 4 hour dive down a YouTube rabbit hole leading to things like reaction videos to this song, more repeats of The Wellerman and My mother told Me, some other sea shanties ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qpgh63l2n4 ), reaction videos to other songs, and videos of people sing in front of their friends for the first time. It was a trip and boy was I in a fucking mood. I finally went to bed, fully aware this song wasn’t going to leave my brain for some time, and as I lie there listening to all those voices serenade me to sleep, I had to figure it out, why were these two stupid Tik Tok videos different?
Ok, fine, I was a little torched when I heard it but if anything, that only enhanced my perception of it. I came up with a few points after listening to both songs again the following day, ya know, just to make sure I did my research:
- It’s a sea shanty, and the power of a shanty is the person singing it. The emotion, the cadence, they can drive that song into whatever area they want to, and it’ll work if it’s done right. Shanties were also sung aboard ships, obviously, but amongst the crew while sailing to and from port, or to their next adventure, just you and your shipmates, belting out tunes to pass the time. As I write this, I had an epiphany, you didn’t always know the man or woman you were sailing next to. Crew members may have joined the night before while you drowned yourself in ale, and while you didn’t know them, you both knew the song and if what happened here doesn’t sum up a shanty perfectly I don’t know what will. Strangers on the interwebs joining together to create a simple piece of art.
- How many of those people had ever sang for anyone before? I’m going to make a guess that most of them have, but tucked in there somewhere are I’m sure a few people who were too self-conscious in life to ever risk letting their voice be heard, yet they found this small gem and decided to add a bit of their own polish to it. Wasn’t letting voices be heard the theme of 2020 during the run-up to the election? It’s something that speaks to our base human nature, sometimes we are too afraid to speak, but when we do, great things may come of it if we are willing to take the risk.
- None of the additional people, not one, in either video attempted to drown the original voice. Every single one of the duets added embellishment you didn’t even know the song needed. In Tik Tok of all the fucking places the most self-righteous, narcissistic, place on the internet next to Facebook and Instagram, people came together to create something for the simple goal of creating something, and my god was it beautiful.
- Name one famous person on that was there. Bet you can’t unless they jumped on the bandwagon for likes and upvotes after it started. This was a bunch of, and I mean this lovingly, “nobodies” who came together, assuming without speaking, and created something wonderful. Take another look at the video, all kinds of people jumped into it and lent their voice to help. This was a song for anyone to lend their talent to, and that they did.
- I forget which one and if I find it I’ll add it, but one reaction video I watched was a voice instructor who was watching this for the first time. He stated “What a remarkable age we live in that we can achieve this with the simple goal of sharing to share”, or something to that affect. I don’t exactly remember at the time of this writing but that absolutely nails my thoughts as well. Nathan put that video out there, maybe to gain views or promote an album I don’t know the guy or his agenda, but what came from it was so much more than I’m sure what he intended. I’m going to choose the positive aspect and not assume he did it for money knowing this would happen.
You get what I’m getting at. This video, both of these videos, are powerful far beyond the words or execution of the song. Nobody was getting paid (as far as I know), to do this. You could probably argue that people jumped on it to gain more views for themselves, or someone was getting paid, or bla bla bla. This time, I choose not to go to that path but instead, see the lighter one. We are drowned with so much…..bullshit for lack of a better term, every. Single. Day. Whether it’s news outlets or social media, the onslaught of nonsense is unrelenting and unforgiving. This was the simplest message of all buried beneath a catchy tune and a trendy video: look what happens when we work together. If I haven’t said it before or said it elsewhere, 2020 was a rough year….for everyone. Ok fine except celebrities and Instagram Influencers, but for the rest of us, it was far from easy. After all we’ve been through, and fuck your divisive political mentality bullshit, I’ll say it again, after all we’ve been through shouldn’t we have learned this by now? Look at the things we can do when we work together for no other benefit than to add our little piece to the bigger puzzle.
We’ve seen trends from the Ice Bucket Challenge to eating Tide Pods. Yes, you read that correctly and if you’re reading this far in the future, please do not judge us too harshly for the actions of few. Who knows what trends may come, but for once I hope this one sticks. I still hate Tik Tok and their ridiculousness, but buried deep within the pile of garbage that the app is, there are beautiful and wonderful things that only need to be realized for what they are; and when they are just maybe our little blue sphere in the vast emptiness of space will become a tiny bit better.
Maybe one day I’ll post this, or maybe one day that writing thing I keep talking about will take off, or maybe I never will. Who knows what the future holds but for now I will save these videos here, in my littler corner of my computer or maybe my tiny little corner of the internet one day, as a reminder of who we can be, how beautiful we can be.
Rendition of My Mother told me I heard first: My Mother Told Me – TikTok – Cullen Vance/ NatiDreddd / Jonny Steward – YouTube
I’m posting the reaction video mentioned above as it contains the first full version I heard, and frankly this guy’s reaction is just heartwarming Vocal Coach REACTS – Nathan Evans ‘The Wellerman’ – YouTube