Defiant Amplification or Decontextualized Commercialization? Protest Music, TikTok, and Social Movements

Protest music has historically been a central part of American social change movements. Although some protest music is used solely to bring attention to the evils of an oppressive group, another purpose it may serve is to foster positive self-definition and feelings of unity in communities of oppressed people, and some songs may even do both. This project aimed to explore how TikTok affords expression and connection in relation to the use of and interaction with protest music in online spaces. A critical discourse analysis of a specific case of TikTok protest music, You About To Lose Yo Job, was conducted through the lenses of personal expression as a feature of connective action and affordance theory. The following three themes emerged: lip-syncing as a tool of defiance and reclamation of space, the use of hashtags to game a commercialized platform, and the decontextualization or loss of essence of protest music. These findings indicated that the social and ideological functions served by protest music as background sounds on TikTok created potential new avenues for agency through spatial defiance afforded by green screens and strategies to amplify users’ content to new audiences. However, dominant ideologies of capitalism were also reinforced through gaming of hashtags that were associated with events and trends of culture, diluting the context and blurring the movement affiliation of users, making unclear the function the protest music may serve.