When was the last time you scrolled through TikTok and didn't hear a deeply sad or emotionally heavy songs paired with a lighthearted video? Especially as they loop endlessly in the background of jokes, outfit checks, or aesthetic montages. Songs about grief, loneliness, heartbreak, or existential dread are transformed into viral sounds, and we watch it stripped down to a single lyric or melody. What’s interesting isn’t just that sad songs go viral, but how quickly their meaning shifts once they become trends.
From a musical perspective, this disconnect between sound, lyrics, and use matters. Sellnow explains that music works rhetorically by combining lyrical meaning with musical cues to guide how audiences feel and interpret a message. When TikTok pulls a short clip out of a song, it disrupts that relationship. A lyric meant to express vulnerability can become background noise for humor or irony. The emotional arc of the song collapses into a few seconds, and the original intent becomes secondary to how the sound functions on the platform.
Adorno’s critique of popular music helps explain why this happens so easily. He argues that popular music relies on standardization and repetition, which encourages us to listen passively rather than engage deeply.
TikTok only intensifies this process. When a sad song becomes a trend, it is repeated so often and in so many unrelated contexts that its emotional weight flattens. The song becomes familiar, catchy, and scrollable.
Remix culture complicates the idea that this is entirely negative. Remix theory suggests that reworking media can create new meanings rather than erase old ones (Bermingham). On TikTok, users sometimes use sad songs to share personal stories or dark humor that reflects real emotions. In those cases, the trend becomes a way of processing feelings together, where the same song can act as both a joke and a quiet confession depending on how it’s used.
What these trends ultimately reveal is not that sadness disappears, but that it becomes easier to package. Sadness becomes aesthetic, ironic, or relatable in ways that fit the platform’s rhythm. The question isn’t whether TikTok ruins sad songs, but whether constant reuse changes how we are allowed to feel them.
When a sad song becomes a trend, does its emotional meaning disappear, or does it simply change into something more communal and easier to carry?
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