Welcome to the Pitchfork Review. I'm Pooja Patel, the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork, and I'm here with

Pitchfork staffer Kat Zeng. Hi, Kat. Hi, Pooja. Kat is our resident TikTok expert. By her choice or by

my choice, it's hard to say, but here she is nonetheless. That's me. Today we're talking about TikTok, the omnipresent 15-second video platform that has taken over

social media.

And we're going to talk about two really different sides of this surprisingly influential

platform.

TikTok has changed the music industry and turned out a bunch of Billboard hits.

And now, following the killing of George Floyd, activists have also co-opted dance and music TikTok in the name of racial justice.

So let's dive in.

So I got a TikTok like a week after I graduated college when I went back home to Texas and was trying to figure out what I was going to do for a job.

And when I first joined the app, I was going to say I had an aneurysm, but that's too dramatic.

It was just like an endless scroll of videos. And these videos can

include anything from comedy sketches to dance videos. TikTok is a very soul-crushingly addictive

time suck. I go on TikTok for like two hours every day and it's so embarrassing because I could do so

much other things with that time but I choose not to. It is an app that's primarily about like

frivolity, distraction, escapism. It definitely kind of reinforces that tendency. I think this is the fundamental

interesting aspect of TikTok is that it's something that should be extremely easy and lighthearted,

but it actually requires you to invest a lot of time into it. And lo and behold, I have a job now,

and the job is to write about TikTok partially.

Can you just explain TikTok and how it works?

Well, I mean, it's a little bit similar to like Instagram stories almost where you like

press the button and you record and you make like a video that's anywhere between 15 seconds to a minute.

...