mehro, a 22-year-old from Manhattan Beach with 3 million monthly listeners on Spotify, kicks off the night. He legally changed his name to his artistic title ‘mehro’ in all lowercase letters because he likes to be “less spoken.” In a recent interview, he said he doesn’t care for theatrics that distract from his lyricism. For tonight’s show, he’s wearing acid wash jeans and a blazer drenched in sequins.
Five children who haven’t seen the likes of a high school classroom yet are jockeying for space on the balcony edge. They are pushing one another out of the way only to be tickled or teased out of giving up their spot when mehro says, “Alright, this is my next song, some of you may know it, it’s called…whore.” The children pause to clap for whore before they go back to pushing each other.
TikTok provided a stage for musicians during Covid: admission is free, the queue is full of openers and each song is 15 seconds long. Still, the brevity blurs the line between music video and commercial. Three bands from TikTok have converged for a live concert at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston tonight: mehro, DWLLRS and Claire Rosinkranz. Bren Eissman and Joey Spurgeon launched their music career as DWLLRS with dreamy aesthetic videos set to their latest songs. Bren, for example, filmed himself in the car listening to the DWLLRS song “Blue Spirits” below the text ‘this song feels like this,’ driving down the highway at sunset when the beat drops. He is mouthing the lyrics: I got a rush in my head right now. There are 1.3 million views on this loop, and comments like “can I listen to it on apple music? [bottom emoji]” get responses from DWLLRS themselves saying “Yes, type in blue spirits.” They’ve posted this song with dozens of captions including “we made a song that feels like growing up,” “the perfect balance of sadness, happiness, and nostalgia,” and questions like, “what do you miss the most about being a kid?”
TikTok isn’t just the concert venue: it’s the backstage interview. It provides opportunities for fans to ask bands questions such as: “How do you see yourself?” “What are you working on right now?” and “What does it mean to you?”
There are a lot of people pushing around for the best view before the headliner, Claire Rosinkranz, starts her set later tonight. It’s unclear how much of this jostling was in preparation for DWLLRS, a duo from San Clemente, California, with 13 singles and 12.7 million likes on TikTok under their belt. Eissman and Spurgeon released their first single “And Then We’ll Be Alright” on Jan. 31, 2020; without any chances to test their music in front of a live audience, they started making TikToks. Their cover of “Chanel” by Frank Ocean in February 2021 was their first video to reach 1 million views. Eissman is visibly straining to hit his notes — he started out as a theater kid and learned how to play the guitar just a few years ago as a freshman in college. The top comments on the video quip that his pauses to catch his breath sound like “he really hit the space bar between every word,” and “this cover was written double spaced.”
Eissman and Spurgeon step out on stage in khakis and Vans. Spurgeon gets set up on his guitar, Eissman bounces around on the other side of the stage, crouching down to sing to fans and reaching over the empty press pit to pass his hand through the crowd. Spurgeon keeps his cool — his eyes are fixed on his frets, even when a girl near the front shouts, “I love you, Joey!” They play a little over half of their singles with little introduction, no covers and no straying from their album recordings. Before their last song Eissman says, “How are you doing Boston? Oh my god, you guys are amazing! I love the Red Sox!”
While the crew resets the stage after DWLLRS, Kill Bill by SZA plays over the sound system; more people sing along to the chorus than they did to any of Eissman and Spurgeon’s songs. DWLLRS’s lyrics are often about the valley between experience and perception: the hopes for a crush and the reality of the relationship, memories of childhood and the nostalgia that follows. The expected hype for a TikTok band clashes hard with the realities of a TikTok audience: the house is full of teens, and I’m sitting on a leather couch next to a mom who’s scrolling on Facebook and pounding Truly Lemonades. My best view of the stage is through the phone screens of the people in front of me.
It’s hard not to wonder: if this concert was on TikTok instead of their camera view, how many people would scroll until they got to the headliner, Claire Rosinkranz? Rosinkranz is a 19-year-old star launched into Spotify fame with hits like “Backyard Boy” and “don’t miss me,” recorded in her dad’s home studio during COVID lockdown and impossible not to recognize if you were surfing TikTok in 2020. How many people would skip mehro and DWLLRS, Rosinkranz’s lesser known songs, or even the verses they don’t recognize to get to the catchiest parts? At that point, why not just watch TikToks at home?
This isn’t to naysay technology or diss these teenagers, who are no doubt excited for this concert. There’s a big crowd here tonight, and filling a venue in Boston is nothing to sneeze at. I asked the security guard closest to me, who can only be a few years older than me at most, does he know Claire Rosinkranz? She’s on stage by now. He says yes. He doesn’t have an account on TikTok, but he scrolls on the For You page and he recognizes her. I ask him, is TikTok music good? He says, “Good is subjective.”
Fair enough. “From a marketing standpoint, it’s genius, but it’s also kind of its own genre.” I ask if he would play this music on his own time or in front of his friends? Or would he be embarrassed? He replies, “That’s funny, I can see that happening.” I’m not sure which one he’s referring to. “You picked an interesting guy to interview for this,” he says. “I have a unique standpoint on music, you know, with my job.”
I’m interested — does he have any takes on this band, or the scene around here? He says no. I get a similar response from the coat check girl, who tells me she doesn’t vibe with the usual “normie Millennial crowd” (her words, not mine) but agrees that hers is a pretty cool job. DWLLRS has a pretty cool job too; they’re singing songs about Blue Spirit cigarettes to high schoolers, and Eissman and Spurgeon themselves don’t even smoke. The crowd, in the end, buoyed any doubts about the music, the bands, the venue — hype begets hype.
