Sea shanties are not the first pandemic example of a virtual but collective musical experience that has ascended to the big trend of the day. Maybe it’s just because “Wellerman” is a great, boisterous bop of a song in any century.īut I don’t think so. Maybe it’s a coincidence that millions of TikTokers are finding delight in a centuries-old music genre meant to bind separate bodies together into one shared, cooperative action. We’re all stuck staring at tiny screens in our own tiny individual boxes, desperately wanting to sing loudly into a stranger’s face while knowing that singing loudly into a stranger’s face is incredibly dangerous right now. Every news story is about division, deadlock, anger, and the massive gulf between the left and the right. Right now, it’s not safe to gather in groups. They are unifying, survivalist songs, designed to transform a huge group of people into one collective body, all working together to keep the ship afloat. One person is the song leader, setting the pace and singing the verses, but the engine of the song is in the repeating chorus that everyone sings together over and over again. They’re songs with simple, blunt rhythms, meant to be easy to learn and easy to sing along with while doing the hard physical work of sailing a large fishing vessel. The sea shanty seems like the strangest possible pick for this year’s new, hot music trend, but as a longtime sea-shanty fan (what can I say, I’m the type who read Horatio Hornblower novels in high school), I’m here to tell you that sea shanties make so much sense for this moment, right now. The shock of getting lit to that is what we see register on the face of the dubious TikTok brother. There’s some overlap between sea shanties and African American spirituals that deserves a lot more attention, but the default picture of the sea shanty as a genre is a bunch of white European sailors bellowing “haul away Joe” in harmony. They’re songs about whaling and strong winds, and they sound the way a bowl of New England clam chowder looks: imprecise, sort of lumpy, and, not to put too fine a point on it, very white. ![]() Sea shanties are also resiliently uncool. Aside from the word Wellerman, they’re full of harpoons and pierheads and the specifics of butchering whales the most recognizable lyrics are lines about “rounding the Cape” and the love of bonny brown-haired lasses. Simplistic in structure, they are deliberately repetitive and full of ideas and references that feel very, very far from life right now. They sound like prehistoric oddities, which is part of the appeal. On the surface, it’s a little weird that digital culture in 2021 would become suddenly obsessed with 200-year-old folk songs about men on whaling boats. (According to a few different sources, a Wellerman” is an employee of the 19th-century Australian whaling company the Weller Bros., and the song is about company ships that would arrive to resupply whaling vessels.) They are both so in the song by the end, singing along happily even though it’s an ancient song and the word Wellerman has been lost to history. As with many of the best TikToks, it’s the naked, transparent sincerity that really sells the video. By the end he’s all in, singing along with the refrains and offering an “oooOO” of harmony as his brother sings the verses. First he’s skeptical of “Wellerman” and then he’s entertained by how much his brother likes it. The magnetic thing about that reaction TikTok is the way the dubious brother gets pulled in. My favorite addition is the sea-shanty reaction video, particularly this one, which has the caption “when I hand my brother the aux”:Ģ021 is the year of the sea shanty /ohOAGvkbtC- Tim - Poster of Hugo Pics January 11, 2021 “Wellerman,” the song that’s gotten especially big in the past few days, has now been remixed and performed by other singers, and other sea shanties have started to pop up. It wasn’t even the first performance of “ Wellerman” I’d seen - in the past month or so, spurred by a Scottish musician named Nathan Evans and others, sea shanties have become increasingly popular on TikTok and then shared widely on other platforms. It was not the first sea shanty I’d seen on TikTok. All of them were links to a TikTok video of several guys singing a song, a sea shanty from the 19th century called “Wellerman,” using TikTok’s duet feature. When I woke up last Friday morning, I realized I had several messages. SeaShantyTok keeps getting better /yWLEHzlPlB- Peter Fries January 8, 2021
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