Moving On Up (on TikTok)

In 2019, Ashnikko broke out after a viral hit on the app. What if it wasn’t a fluke?

- By Emma Madden

A voice laughs maniacally. Logan Paul sways his hips. Swipe down. A voice laughs maniacally. Two college-age men, both shirtless, grab their crotches and sway. Swipe. A voice laughs maniacally. Miley Cyrus lip-syncs along with the lyrics “Stupid boy think that I need him.”

This was the experience of being on TikTok in the fall of 2019. While that grating laugh seemed, at first, to belong to the app, you could discover, with some research, that it came from the mouth of Ashton Casey, an artist who raps—under the alias Ashnikko—about clits and cutting off dicks like she’s writing the script for the next Human Centipede movie. Within just three weeks of its first upload, her song “stupid,” featuring Yung Baby Tate, was the No. 2 most-used song on TikTok with 1.3 million video uses. And in the months that followed, “stupid” became inextricable from the TikTok experience. You couldn’t scroll through the app without hearing “Wet! Wet! Wet!”

On TikTok, it’s common to hear the same song over and over. If a sound inspires one user to create a video with it, it will inspire another and another, until it amasses hundreds, then thousands, of videos that use the same sound. It’s a kind of exposure that reaches far beyond the capability of radio, YouTube, Spotify, or any other music-discovery platform, past or present.