Why is this 2024's Most Liked TikTok?
Leah Halton’s lip-sync of “Praise Jah In The Moonlight,” posted to TikTok on February 5th, is officially in the running to be one of the top-liked TikTok videos of all time. The twelve second clip so far has 744 million views and 48.4 million likes. Over half of these views and likes occurred between April 10th and April 16th — a little over two months after the video’s initial posting.
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I’m able to assemble a rough record of the video’s viral rise because the comments are full of scorekeepers. “48.4 M April 22 anyone?” ask at least a hundred people today, just like thousands of people did on April 11th, or March 15th when the video was still mega-viral but not yet in the nine-digit territory. Others have posted a kind of scoreboard comparing the Leah Halton video to some of the other most-liked TikToks of all time: the Chocolate Strawberries video and the number one crown, Bella Poarch’s lip-sync of “M to the B” from back in 2020, when the platform was young. The Bella Poarch video currently has 821.9 million views and 66 million likes (note: the most-viewed TikTok of all time is a whole different competition, but Halton’s still in the top ten there).
If just 300 million of the 744 million viewers of that video watched the full thing (which seems like a reasonable guess) then about 127 years of human consciousness has been spent on Leah Halton singing “Praise Jah In The Moonlight,” worldwide. At least five minutes of my own consciousness has been spent on the video, watching it several times (first for work and now for this post.)
So why this video?
Retention editing aesthetics
The video begins in extreme close up, with Halton’s eyes moving in time with the beat. Then, at the three second mark, she snaps her head back with the bass drop of the song. She’s posted several other videos that use this technique of extreme close-up and then head yank.
Each glance and lip movement is as choreographed as ballerina’s legs and arms. TikTok dances are no more frivolous than any other kind of dance. The video perfectly follows a musical phrase of the song, starting and ending right where it starts and ends. It grabs your attention and keeps you from scrolling away. Videos of Leah Halton where she’s just talking also show a crazy amount of editing skill: her cuts are frequent, varied, and precisely matched to the audio track. But it’s subtle, kind of hypnotic. I opened a video of her putting on make-up and yapping and found myself oddly soothed, the way a baby must feel looking at a mobile. I blinked and two minutes had passed.
People have grown tired of the really obvious retention techniques of influencers like MrBeast — all the loud dings, jump cuts, and explosions — to the point where it’s become a thing people parody. The “Baby Gronk Rizzed Up Livvy Dunne” video, by Hoopify, is memorable not just for all the new words it introduced to American English, but as a really perceptive parody of this editing style.
The pendulum has swung towards retention editing that is quieter, less flashy — the master of this is, of course, Emma Chamberlain. There is a little bit of Emma Chamberlain in everybody posting internet videos after 2017.
I’m following YouTube critics Colin and Samir here in dividing social media influencer editing styles by the two poles of MrBeast and Emma Chamberlain. They aren’t truly opposites, and I think each one often gets reduced to their gender in ways that aren’t helpful. But the difference in editing is salient: MrBeast edits like he’s playing the trumpet and the drums, Chamberlain like she’s playing soft acoustic guitar.
This difference in style is also like rhymes in poetry. Some poems get a lot out of rhymes sounding really obvious and clanging around but other poems are best when the rhymes almost feel accidental. Someone like Robert Frost makes me think of Halton or Chamberlain: in his best rhyming poetry, Frost inserts rhymes while still speaking naturally. Similarly, in Chamberlain or Halton’s work, the retention editing tricks are subtle, you watch the video and think nothing is going on, just like you might miss a rhyme in Acquainted With The Night. Someone like Emily Dickinson makes me think of MrBeast: her poems often overemphasize their structure, sounding like deranged, cerebral hymns or nursery school rhymes, just as MrBeast videos are really loud and bold about how edited they are.
But you can’t give all the credit to Leah Halton and her editing skill. The song “Praise Jah In The Moonlight” is written by Lauryn Hill with her son. That’s part of why this video is viral: the song is really really good, because Lauryn Hill is an absolute legend. It’s the same story with the “Dreams” cranberry-juice drinking skateboard video, or with Bella Poarch. Halton makes herself into a perfect vessel for a great song. She lets the song wear her body and face the way a hand wears a glove.
Layered responses
Concretely, this TikTok is a video of Leah Halton’s response to a piece of media which she invites us to share in. The commenters tracking the numbers are doing the same thing: inviting us to share in their response to Leah Halton’s response to Lauryn Hill. And what am I doing now, if not more of the same thing, inviting you to share in my response?
The responding is what’s most interesting. Layered structures of audiences responding to other audiences’ responses, I believe, are the key innovation of web interface-based art, including memes and TikToks. Regardless of how good the song is or how skilled/beautiful Leah Halton is, that’s not really why the video is popular now. People are now watching the video, in April, because it’s a way of watching TikTok itself: how big can a post get? How powerful is this platform? Will Leah Halton unseat Bella Poarch?
The mid-April virality comes from people curious to see just how many views and likes the video can accumulate. By the time it landed on my feed, the most interesting thing about the video were the numbers the platform attached to it, not the content itself.
A video that reaches 744 million people is crazy, and a technology which can make that happen is both fascinating and scary. There’s nobody on TikTok who doesn’t think about that kind of stuff. But at the same time, even as we discuss the “algorithm” and its effects on culture, there’s still humans and artists at the center of this story. And those numbers, for TikTokers, also represent their power en masse.
I think you can apply this kind of reading to two other recent TikTok memes: Donghua Jinlong and the TikTok Rizz Party. Both of these are niche, random things (the first an obscure factory in China that makes glycine, the second a random sweet sixteen party in Long Island) that nobody has any reason to know or care about. But somehow, the platform has made both of these things extremely famous. People love to watch Turkish Quandale Dingle usurp Blue Tie Kid, yes, and they do they like their glycine well-made and FDA approved, but the real reason to watch this videos is to encounter the power of the platform and its communities. As I’m reading the memes from my corner of the algorithm, that seems to me the big preoccupation on English-language TikTok in this moment.