Backup Account will always be brief—not 280 characters brief, but brief as in each edition will focus on one TikTok only. Paid subscribers thank you for your support, new perks below. Follow me on IG or TT for antics.
During the 15 years I promoted raves, my worst fear was someone dying at one of my events. So when a queer creator’s clip of being stuck in a festival queue went viral last summer, it was a great relief to know that I was no longer in charge of placing barricades and implementing security plans.
→ → Here is this week’s TikTok (watch via youtube):
On the night of the 2016 Oakland Ghostship Fire, I was in Tel Aviv. Due to the time difference, I got the news during breakfast, but it would be more than six hours before most of my friends back home would wake up to find out what had happened. Stories on Instagram weren’t really a thing yet, so everyone who was awake while the incident played out was glued to the comments section of the Facebook event wall. We had no clue that by the next day the internet and media would blast this onto the world stage. I’ll never forget having to put my phone into airplane mode that afternoon as my EasyJet headed to Berlin. It wasn’t turning it back on that I remember, it was turning it off. Hours later, when I had arrived at my hotel room I put on the telly. The top story on the BBC World News was showing a graphic to explain to Europeans where Oakland, CA was.
"Dem have we in here like a pack of sardines and we cannot escape, we cannot come out. Mama, we trap in this bumbo."
This plea by @emilemorgan_ to fellow TikTokers who were stuck in the exit queue at London’s Wireless Festival actually echoed louder than the fuss about Nicky Minaj’s short set time or the 30-degree heat that night. Posted a year after the fatal crowd crush during Travis Scott’s festival-closing set, this clip was destined for virality. When the Astroworld incident was happening, the tragedy dominated my TikTok feed for what seemed like weeks. For those of us close to the Ghostship tragedy, you couldn't help but see the similarities. Our scene was also very online but frankly nothing in comparison to this.
Yes, the internet took this queer POC’s Jamaican Patois and spun it into a million directions [$ubscribers can find links to my fav uses of Morgans viral below], but amid all the playful (and occasionally hateful) decontextualization, Morgan themselves is unmistakably still present.
Morgan is their own back-up vocalist, speaking over and under themselves during their TikToks. They use a filter to dub their voice onto itself, they essentially ad-lib their own audio tracks, creating something that has gradually become their signature. In a metaverse built by AI, the imperfections of Morgan’s overdubbing appear shockingly bright and absurd. Using a voice filter to make an emergency SOS sound funnier is just pure camp. Of course, the notion that someone’s joke needs to be funny enough to keep them alive is a bit of a vibe killer.
Queer people have always had to make light of their horror. We are the brunt of the jokes until we are the writer of said jokes. Our pain and injustice are subtitled and serve as the back-up singers to our punchlines.
Hot take: The meme-ification of tragedy is political cartooning.
I’m feeling wordy so let's run with it: TikTok has gamified following the narrative of a meme. It keeps people glued to the app. You never want to miss the next viral joke, especially if it is an expansion of an older one. This shit moves so fast people, if it needs explaining you’re already off the cool wagon (and for some creators missing out on the payday). But for most users, following the crumb-trail of a popular sound is how they get in on the joke. NGL said trail often leads to a clip from a Spongebob Squarepants episode, but more and more these sounds lead to a wildly sobering world event.
In Morgan’s original TikTok they and everyone around them are in plain sight. Morgan's besties are seen beside him, laughing into the camera as they use humor to take control of a helpless and dangerous situation. But in all the myriad of ways the internet has stripped this moment of its visual, and reduced it into a sound, its origins remain.
Spoiler alert: Morgan made it out just fine.