- A viral TikTok video launched a Scottish postal worker into fame and a music career.
- "Wellerman" a remix of a traditional sea shanty is now number one on the UK Top 40 charts.
Far be it for me to question our new social media overloads at TikTok. They’ve got a winning formula for constant scrolling. Using filters, video structure, and trends, everyone on the app seems poised for virality at any moment. Even the most mundane content (repotting plants, morning routines, super-clips of sad girls crying) can easily garner millions of views. Right now, sea shanties are having a genuine moment.
Group singing used to be a lot more socially acceptable.
Wondering what a sea shanty is? You’re not alone. They’re songs sung by sailors to make the workday go by better. If you’re not on TikTok (first mistake), get to know the song Wellerman. It made heavy use of TikTok’s “duet” feature, allowing different creators to layer their vocals and instruments into one song. The original singer, Nathan Evans, was a Scottish mail carrier until two weeks ago. He quit his job after his video earned over ten million views. Now, he’s recording music full time because his first release on Spotify (an up-tempo Wellerman remix) charted with over three million plays in its first week. And he’s No. 1 on the UK’s Top 40 chart. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Brian May duetted his original shanty video.
Say what you will about “going viral” and social media. It reveals something earnest and charming about the human spirit. Sometimes, we fall in love with something – even as small as a sea shanty – so hard we vault a person out of the mundane into their dreams.
We could use more shanty energy in our lives.
The disruption to Evans’ life – and anyone who took time to duet him – is kind of the point of sea shanties. They’re fun songs to break up the oppressive mundanity of life at sea. You don’t have to be a talented singer on a ship, it’s more just about joining in and contributing. The structure is remarkably similar to what Wellerman went through on TikTok. One singer handles the verses, sometimes improvising, while the rest of the crew joins in for the choruses.
You can’t say that TikTok is always a meritocracy. Often it’s just the weird, horrifying, or bizarre that gets a lot of attention. But sometimes, people who just needed a platform get their big break, like Sarah Cooper. She’s the comedian who parlayed her TikTok videos using Trump audio into an entire Netflix special.
Nathan Evans’s rise to fame, along with the current obsession with sea shanties, speaks to the long 2020 into 2021 we’re experiencing. We’re fixated on the horizon line. All of us, hoping for a glimpse of a time and place when we might escape the confines of social distance, sheltering-in-place, and losing our loved ones to overcrowded hospitals. Now, with the vaccine, there’s hope, but it appears we’re moving no closer to that distant shore.
So why not sing while we’re out here? It’s sea shanties, but it’s also GME stock, tie-dye loungewear, and Mandalorian Season 2. It’s anything to break up the ceaseless rocking of the waves and the uncertainty of being at sea.