THE NEWYORKER, MARCH 2, 2020 71
two-thousands like Built to Spill and
the Strokes, which filled the spaces be-
tween grunge, punk, and emo, and prob-
ably avoided the beach. Beach Bunny’s
tracks are not exactly innovative—most
contain an uncomplicated chord pro-
gression, a frenzied drum explosion, and
not much else. If Trifilio sounds like
anyone, it might be the late Niall Quinn,
of the Cranberries. Trifilio likes to add
a light Celtic trill to her words to make
them fit a musical measure; she some-
times turns the word “love” into “lay-
ee-ohhve.” This Quinnian tic can be
heard in guitar rock everywhere these
days, though this is probably an acci-
dent, not an intentional tribute. The In-
ternet’s memory is rapidly shortening.
Beach Bunny may not even know that
its name sounds like a reference to a
time in the late two-thousands when
indie-rock bands were naming them-
selves things like Beach Fossils and
Wavves. When a journalist compared
Trifilio to the grunge icon Liz Phair in
an interview last year, she admitted to
being unfamiliar with Phair’s work.
Acts of earlier eras could more easily
be traced to their predecessors, often by
the artists’ own admission, but Beach
Bunny comes from a generation for which
stylistic influence is absorbed through
lifelong exposure to a mass jumble of
online reference points. Trifilio got her
start in music by performing acoustic-gui-
tar covers and uploading them to You-
Tube, as so many of her peers did before
TikTok began pulling aspiring talents
into its slipstream. One song she cov-
ered was Katy Perry’s “E.T.,” a faintly in-
dustrial-sounding collaboration with
Kanye West. In a track on “Honeymoon”
called “Ms. California,” Trifilio sings,
“She’s your girl / She’s all in your pic-
tures / California girl / I wish I was her.”
It’s hard not to hear this song as a kind
of garage-rock photo negative of Katy
Perry’s “California Gurls.” An homage
like this would have seemed incongru-
ous in an earlier era of indie rock, but
Trifilio’s generation uses pop songwrit-
ing as a primary source rather than as a
counterpoint, translating it effortlessly.
T
ikTok is a new platform, but its
catchy, looping clips make use of
an old music-industry trick. Psychol-
ogists and music-theory scholars have
long studied the brain’s response to
repeated exposure to music. As early
as 1903, Max Friedrich Meyer, a pro-
fessor of psychoacoustics, showed that
a piece of music’s “aesthetic effect” for
participants in a study was “improved
by hearing the music repeatedly.” In
1968, the social psychologist Robert
Zajonc coined the term “mere-expo-
sure effect” to describe this phenom-
enon. According to Zajonc’s findings,
appreciation of a song increased the
more the subjects heard it, no matter
how complex the music was or how
it aligned with their personal tastes.
This insight is the driving force be-
hind the marketing of popular music
in the modern era: FM radio stations
and popular streaming playlists are
most successful when they program
a small pool of songs, inducing the
mere-exposure effect as quickly as
possible.
On TikTok, the length of a video is
restricted to sixty seconds, but most
clock in at less than half a minute. The
app allows a seamless scroll through
videos, demanding rapid-fire con-
sumption. It also groups together clips
that contain the same song, encourag-
ing you to listen over and over again.
The app’s success at making hits is
partly due to its ability to accelerate the
mere-exposure effect, making songs fa-
miliar at warp speeds. Without Tik-
Tok, it’s unlikely that a song like “Prom
Queen” could have reached the veloc-
ity it did. The official video for the song
now has more than seven million views
on YouTube.
With increased exposure comes in-
creased scrutiny, and the micro-viral-
ity of “Prom Queen” caused some lis-
teners—maybe ones who caught only
a snippet of the track—to question its
message. In one verse, Trifilio sings,
“I’ve been starving myself / Carving
skin until my bones are showing.” Last
summer, Trifilio pinned a lengthy com-
ment underneath the song’s YouTube
video. “Since this video is blowing up
I feel the need to address something,”
she wrote. “The lyrics are a criticism
on modern beauty standards and the
harmful effects beauty standards can
have on people.... You are already a
Prom Queen, you are already enough.”
The message was about two hundred
words—a longer piece of writing than
any Beach Bunny song. The New Yorker
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