{"id":8947,"date":"2025-07-21T01:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T01:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/?p=8947"},"modified":"2025-07-26T02:32:26","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T02:32:26","slug":"tiktok-guys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/?p=8947","title":{"rendered":"tiktok guys"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Two TikTok musicians went viral for doing duets with parakeets and remixing theme songs from 90s cartoons. Between them, they had five million followers and seventeen brand deals. After a while, the numbers stopped rising, and the comment sections filled with: \u201cCool but empty.\u201d<\/em> They didn\u2019t know what to do next. They heard about an old composer\/ engineer, living above Tim Hortons. He once mixed Ray Charles in a single night, then vanished. They found him tending to a tomato garden. He agreed to meet once a week but no cameras, no phones, no posts. The first session, he played them a recording of a faucet dripping. \u201cLoop that,\u201d he said, \u201cand make it honest.\u201d They blinked. \u201cHonest?\u201d The weeks that followed were stranger: record silence until it breaks something inside you, sing into a pillow and try feeling it in your feet, spend an hour trying to not<\/em> play anything catchy. One of them rolled his eyes. \u201cThis is performance art for morons.\u201d He ceased coming. He released a new track: 600,000 views and forgotten by morning. The other stayed. After months, the mentor handed him a cassette and said, \u201cThis was my best work. Never released. Just hold onto it.\u201d He took it home, listened once late at night, no lights on. He didn\u2019t know what to make of it. But something about the gesture stayed with him more than the music. Years later, he made a track using washing machine hum, tape hiss, and a single note stretched like taffy. No hashtags. No hooks. Just something that felt like a question with no need for an answer. It didn\u2019t go viral. One afternoon, after a small show in a bookstore basement, a nervous teenager came up and said, \u201cI don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing, but I have to try.\u201d He reached into his bag and gave them the cassette. \u201cThis might help, might not.\u201d He never saw them again but sometimes wonders if they ever pressed play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two TikTok musicians went viral for doing duets with parakeets and remixing theme songs from 90s cartoons. Between them, they had five million followers and seventeen brand deals. After a […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[899],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-8947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-improvising"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}