Sad Girls on TikTok: Musical and Multimodal Participatory Practices as Affective Negotiations of Ordinary Feelings and Knowledges in Online Music Cultures

Abstract

This article examines musical participatory practices on TikTok as mediations of ordinary feelings and knowledges. It conducts a multimodal analysis of user-generated videos that recirculated the song “Complex” by Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod, which became widely successful on the app in 2022. Through its features and sociotechnical affordances, TikTok fosters feminine-coded articulations of intimate affects and negotiations of ordinary feelings and knowledges that have been marginalized in popular music cultures. Its intersecting algorithmic logics and human practices also create new rules about what affective sensibilities are foregrounded and how they are circulated through multimodal and memetic participatory practices.