Musical.ly: An Unexamined App is not Worth Downloading

The app is called musical.ly and it’s the eleventh most popular free app in the Apple app store. Its constituents are called “musers”. Musers select an audio clip and record a video lip syncing or dancing to the audio. Unlike Dubsmash, musical.ly allows musers to follow and like one another’s “musicals”. There is a leaderboard with rankings of the musers with the most “hearts” (likes) updated day over day.

My sister is an avid muser at 12 years old. And she is the Virgil to my Dante in the hellish, comical, and absurd world of musical.ly. Most musers fall in between the ages of ten and 16. Most are Brandy Melville girls or wannabes of such types. Many of the girls look older because heavy makeup is the rule rather than the exception. Instagram brows, dark lipstick, Kylie Jenner nails, and heavy eye makeup can make 14 look more like 18.

One of the most popular songs on musical.ly is Drake’s “How About Now”. The audio snippet goes as follows:
You ain’t really fuck with me way back then girl, how ‘bout now?
Cause I’m up right now and you suck right now

It makes sense when Drake raps these words. He’s an adult and old enough to have a “way back then” period in his life. I watched more than twenty muser’s #howboutnow tagged musicals and they all followed the same basic format. Drake’s song opens with a series of baby photos and then dramatically cuts to the muser singing sultrily into the front-facing camera—how bout now?! it demands. There’s an implicit wow-factor at work here. Following the collage of what are literally infant photos, the present appearance of the muser is revealed and meant to elicit a WOAH, that child grew up to become…that slightly taller child wearing burgundy lipstick? When the “now” you still has braces and the walls of your bedroom are hot pink—talk about bathos.

The same incongruity is presented when kids rap and sing about their “exes”. They’re tweens. Many of the videos are clearly shot in the backseat of mom or dad’s car, replete seatbelts cutting into the undersides of chins still swathed in baby fat.

Dubsmash, a comparable lip syncing app, works because you choose who to share your silliness with by sending it directly to them. There is no public profile for strangers or future employers to discover.  

Most muser’s unintentional comedy is rooted in the disconnect between their being terribly self-conscious and not at all self-aware—a hallmark of adolescence. Irony, sarcasm, and dark humor are not yet a fact of life. So a lot of the musicals are painfully earnest—even the ones tagged #comedy. When you see tween girls rapping about their “man” and using mildly profane language, there isn’t much to laugh with them about. You can only laugh at the absurdity of the videos. You have to wonder—what do these kids believe they are creating? Do they think it’s art?

Is it?

Originality is not particularly valued in musical.ly. From what I can glean, a great counterfeit is the most heavily rewarded type of musical. The entire concept of lip-syncing is derivative, so perhaps it’s apposite that the app’s luminaries are difficult to distinguish from one another. Musical.ly is the ultimate testament to capitalism. The song selection, camera work, makeup, and facial expressions are controlled entirely by the desire to imitate what is a proven success and acquire profit (hearts and followers).

I’m in a strange limbo where I can understand why my tweenage sister finds the app fun and worthy of hours of time spent—you can self-indulgently share your music taste and face/body and accumulate followers, the ultimate proof of self-worth— but I also find it stupid and embarrassing. I’d surmise that people older than mid-teen can’t indulge unironically because the app is so vain and self-aggrandizing. That being said, I made a wholehearted foray into the musical.ly world knowing no one I know was likely to be on it.

I could not, for my life, figure out how one prominent muser made her movements so sharp. Her camera work was enviable. So as millennials are wont to do, I looked up a tutorial on youtube. Admittedly, I felt some shame in doing so, but the muser had a channel with exactly what I was looking for. The channel and tutorial’s existence was consoling in some ways because I could rationalize that my desire for a step-by-step guide to lip syncing and gesturing was shared by enough people to create a demand for the tutorial I sought (warped, I know). The muser’s channel had many videos and lots of hate. I scrolled down to comments and the top-voted comment was: I can't believe I just watched a video on how to lip sync and add hand motions whilst filming. Wtf am I doing? The comment had 410 likes as of 1/5/16 at 11:40 AM. The comment acknowledges the ridiculousness of seeking out guidance from an internet famous tween in order to perform two straightforward actions.

At 22, the commenter’s final question resonated all too powerfully with me—wtf am I doing?

The musicals aren’t tongue-in-cheek, which is offensive to my sensibilities. But the reason I don’t tell my little sister to rein in her cringe-worthy red lipstick, Drake rapping, “goddamn, goddamn” videos that she will no doubt regret is that, in fact, I do get it. Not only is it fun when you get over the what am I doing aspect, but I was 12 once. I had AIM and Myspace and a host of other things I’d be chagrinned to speak to.  

I realize that my musical.ly adventure is rooted more in the social experiment realm than in organic belonging. I feel like the Queen Bees and Wannabes author. Or Jane Goodall. So to bolster my credibility, I’ll admit I’ve been a muser for about a week now—a heavy user, mind you. To counteract the invisible hand of the musical.ly market, my bright idea was to create a niche in which I’d be the most eminent muser: old music. How quaint am I? And what does it mean that I feel and fear old at 22?

It’s a mistake to treat all youth equally, though. In learning this app and subjecting myself to its content, I’m by no means envied by my peers. In musing, all I’m garnering (if anything) is social capital amongst tweens, which is an oxymoron. A twenty-something considered cool by tweens is necessarily uncool. These kids are silently mouthing about activities they have no clue about: drinking, smoking, sex. Driving. It’s entirely comical to enter the world of musical.ly as an adult. 
If I were to top the musical.ly leaderboard one day I don’t believe any of my friends would consider it “cool”. Because there is youth1: using a fake ID and the thrill of getting past the bouncer. And there is youth2: where you’re not even carded before being turned away. Musers occupy the space between youth1 and youth2. It’s the gap between your self-image and where your development actually is (mentally and physically). Muser’s belief that they occupy youth1 when they absolutely embody youth2 is the only explanation for the proliferation of these musicals, which are embarrassment incarnate.  

In musical.ly, as in Terrence Malick’s Badlands, the dissonance between what you see and what you hear is striking. Unlike Badlands, not in an artful way. 

Find me on musical.ly @teddydachamp