In recent months, TikTok’s increasingly influential role in the music industry has been questioned and criticized more than ever before. With FKA Twigs, Florence and the Machine and Halsey each complaining about industry pressure on them to create TikTok hits, a backlash has emerged to protect artistic integrity in the face of the platform’s mercilessly unpredictable algorithms.
But Vedesh Sookoo never felt this pressure.
A Chutney Soca musician from Trinidad, his twenty-year career has been built around the old-school Caribbean ways: club nights, festival spots and the buzz of his music at the top of carnivals. He had no songs on YouTube, Spotify, or any social media.
Then it went viral on TikTok.
In May, Sookoo’s 14-year-old son enthusiastically shared a TikTok that used one of his songs. Then another video appeared. Then another. “[My son] it was like, ‘Dad, this is out of this world, you don’t know how popular you are,’” Sookoo recounts. the gals.
Every day, Sookoo logged onto his son’s TikTok, amazed to find more videos of people around the world filming their reactions to his 2008 song, “Meat is for Man.”
Sookoo’s sound, Chutney Soca, is a musical style born in Trinidad and Tobago. The genre originated from folk songs brought by East Indian laborers who were sent to the islands under British colonial rule. In Trinidad, folk tunes eventually blended with the steel-soaked calypso rhythms of the Afro-Caribbean community, resulting in Chutney Soca.
Chutney Soca’s lyrics tell stories and like a lot of Caribbean music, it can be overtly erotic with sexist undertones. The virality of “Flesh is for the Man” is partly due to the shock factor of its lyrics: “I want to get married but I want a fat woman / because the bone is for the dog and the meat is for the man.”
TikTokers first started filming comically horrified reactions to the words, along with captions like “WTF are these lyrics?”. Sookoo states that it was never his intention to offend, “People can hear the fun in my voice and that’s why they love it. I believe that all women are beautiful.”
“The virality of ‘Meat Is For The Man’ is partly due to the shock factor of its lyrics”
These first “Meat is for Man” TikToks were posted in Guyana, a bastion of Chutney music, before crossing continents to reach Somalia, where influencer Rosey Rose took it.
Rose filmed herself looking unsure as she heard Sookoo’s lyrics, before bursting into a gleeful spin as the upbeat steel pans kicked in. Her caption reads “you’ll never starve with me, that’s for sure.”
Rose’s TikTok received 444,300 likes. Trinidadian commentators proudly claimed the song as a badge of honour; one said: “This is Chutney Soca artist Vedesh Sookoo… straight from the Caribbean.”
Before long, women of color around the world embraced the song as a body-positive anthem for women with curves. Nigerian pop superstar Yemi Alade posted a video to her 17 million Instagram followers that received 1 million views, and a caption that read “whoever sang this song is my type #findhim”.
Natasha Thasan, a Toronto-based saree designer with 291,400 followers on TikTok, has been posting an ongoing series of herself eating food to the song, garnering up to 1.1 million views per video. Thasan, who has struggled with an eating disorder, says the song is “saving lives” by reminding people to eat in a positive way: “For me, it’s ‘Meat is for health,'” she says. the gals. “The bone is vulnerable. Eat nutritious food, because you don’t want any dog chasing you!”
“You can derive a meaning from each song that benefits you in the best way”
Natasha Thasan
Thasan, who is from Sri Lanka’s Tamil community, makes a point of eating with her hands to increase exposure to the cultural values of marginalized groups, “It’s ritual when I put that song on. Yes, it’s funny and it’s about a man, but you can take a meaning out of every song that benefits you in the best way.”
The song’s viral vindication speaks volumes for TikTokers’ strong ability to celebrate different types of music and lyrics. Julia Toppin, a music business lecturer at the University of Westminster, credits some creators for this attitude, “I can imagine them fully embracing body positivity in the song and then just running with it,” she says. the gals.
Toppin offers guidance to young people building careers in the music industry and welcomes TikTok’s presence on the scene. “It’s very positive for people who would never get signed by a label because they’re too special or don’t belong in a pop aesthetic,” she says. “Artists who complain about TikTok tend to be determined.”
“Artists who complain about TikTok tend to settle”
Julia Toppin
As industry executives from the world’s biggest music companies are overwhelmingly white men, artists from countries or communities that aren’t on the bigwigs’ radar are likely to face disadvantages when it comes to being heard.
But a TikTok trend doesn’t discriminate based on what kind of music you’re making and where. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world as an artist. If your track gets popular, you’ll get noticed,” says Toppin. “That’s the best thing about digitization, it creates a more equal space and you’ll get tracks from Kenya, Trinidad, France, wherever.”
Sookoo has not lined up licensing deals to receive sync royalties from its videos and has not monetized the trend. He’s looking into it, but says he’s glad his music has made so many people happy. “Money isn’t everything,” he says. “Trinidad is so small, if there’s an opportunity to get our music out here, we’ll take it.”
In total, “Meat is for Man” has reached over 100 million views on TikTok and Instagram as of July 2022. For Sookoo, this is a record achievement: “If you ask me, “Meat is for Man” is the biggest chutney song in history.”
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