[insert word]core, or the endless pursuit for the zeitgest of the times
If you're anything like me, you have undoubtedly found yourself doom scrolling through TikTok at three in the morning.
“Just a few minutes” you tell yourself as you get in bed, lay your head down on the pillow, lay flat on your side and hold your phone just at the perfect length between your face and the plug where your phone is charging (careful not to drag it too close to your face and accidentally disconnect it). At some point, TikTok always wins. You become incredibly self aware of how uncomfortable you feel laying in this position and how your eyes feel as dry as when spongebob met Sandy Cheeks for tea at her atmospheric treedome.
At this point, it is clear you know that you should go to bed. It is quite simple, honestly, just press the button on the side of your phone and leave it on your bedside table.
But you want to keep scrolling.
So, you give in. Surrendering, you unplug your phone and lay in a more comfortable position.
*Scroll*
“Hey guys! Come thrifting with me...”
*Scroll*
Video of Charli D’amelio dancing
*Scroll*
“Here is what I had for lunch today as a stay-at-home girlfriend....”
*Scroll*
Another video of Charli D’amelio dancing
*Scroll*
Next thing you know it is only 2 hours until your alarm goes off and you have to get out of bed.
It was on a miserable night like this that I came across an edit of a bunch of random videos, seemingly unrelated, with Mozart’s Lacrimosa playing in the background. The videos ranged from Halle Berry winning an Academy Award to Liz Truss’ resignation speech to Patrick Bateman walking down an office hallway with his headphones on.
My eyes trailed down to the caption, were a single hashtag read: “#corecore”.
Huh? Seems a little bit redundant. I pressed on it.
What I saw next took me by surprise. The hashtag corecore was not as obscure as I thought, with millions of videos popping up when one pressed on the hashtag. The videos were all the same kind - an amalgamation of random videos with emotive music playing in the background.
Needless to say, I was intrigued.
What is corecore?
Edits are just what they sound like: a bunch of videos of [celebrity / fictional character] cut and mashed together with the editor's song of choice playing in the background. Editing culture has gone hand in hand with the conception and rise of social media - I would argue that it took a particular boost and amassed a handful of creators since the platform “Vine” grazed our screens. It is possible that I was too young to remember seeing edits anywhere else before that, but I vividly remember Vine being the first place where I came across fan edits of celebrities and fictional characters.
As we all know, Vine met its premature end just three years after its official release, and in October 2016 the app shut down - never to be downloaded again.
Still, edits survived.
It wasn’t long until I began to see the same kind of fan made edits I saw on Vine now being posted Twitter
For a while, the craft of edits found an outlet in Twitter - but it all changed when TikTok came along. The audio-visual platform became the perfect app for edits to be posted and thrive. If you have TikTok, you most likely have come across these - be it edits of Pedro Pascal with Britney Spears’ Toxic playing or Lionel Messi one’s with Taylor Swift “You’re on Your Own, Kid” - edits have large audiences and they're incredibly popular. Edits range from all genres, celebrities, gender, race, etc: from BTS edits, to Breaking Bad edits (incredibly popular on TikTok) to edits of Formula 1 - you will find an one of these videos catering to your interests so long as you go onto the search bar and type down what you want to see.
I love edits - and it is hard to deny their appeal. They're like mini movies of your favourite person that you can watch over and over again - some of them are funny, some are especially clever, and most (if not all) are incredibly well done.
But, where does #corecore fit into all this?
#corecore is a video editing style that has obviously been inspired, and is the result of, TikTok and its culture of edits. It is more like a form of visual poetry, in that the style is meant to evoke strong, often ignored or unnamed feelings in viewers - and it has been dubbed “CoreCore”.
Urban Dictionary defined it as “art deconstructed through a series of clips invoking some emotions, usually in the form of a short, tiktok reel that you develop your own meaning to”.
Upon further research, I found that the term first popped up on Tumblr in 2020, and that the usage of the hashtag on TikTok dates back to July 2022. The original creator of the trend is unknown, but many credit user @masonoelle as the first notable example of this form of editing on the platform. The video in question consists of footage of the Arctic ice cap melting over the course of 35 years, videos of TikTok superstar Charli D’amelio dancing, clips from the cult classic “American Psycho”, and people shopping.
Example of corecore. Video taken from @masonelle’s TikTok account.
Under #corecore’s page on Know Your Meme, it is stated that the editing style “plays on the ‘-core’ suffix by making a ‘core’ out of the collective consciousness of all ‘cores’.” This trend can essentially be thought of as an anti-trend, almost. When edited correctly, a corecore video can splice together a clip from an unknown movie, next to a video of Walter White learning her has cancer, to an unrelated politician’s interview, with a random song in the background - all this to create a compelling impression that hints at meaning, but it may not be felt as more than just a feeling.
And it is never too “in your face”.
But why “core”?
In tandem with the edits, another phenomenon that has taken over TikTok are ‘aesthetics’. These ‘aesthetics’ are hard to describe to anyone who is not a user of the platform, yet one must try and somewhat divorce the online term from the dictionary definition of ‘aesthetic’. TikTok aesthetics are more like subcultures that are inherently driven by the way one dresses, the music one listens to, the books one reads, the movies one watches, and much much more. Down to the most minute factors of one’s interests and personality. There are countless aesthetics on the app: from the ultra-popular ‘Y2K’ aesthetic (characterised by low rise jeans, everything glitter, handbags, the use of colour such as hot pink, and makeup deeply resembling that of Bratz dolls) to coquette core (characterised by ribbons in one’s hair, reading Lolita by Nabokov, white dresses with intricate lacework, and listening to Lana del Rey) to the more male-directed Bloke Core (characterised by Adidas footwear, listening to the FIFA soundtracks and football jerseys).
Example of Y2K aesthetic. Taken from TikTok user. Account: @andy.00s
(It is important to note that, within TikTok, the words ‘aesthetic’ and ‘core’ are used interchangeably)
The origin of the ‘-core’ suffix is a transplant from the word “hardcore”. Before TikTok, “hardcore” would be used to describe those individuals who were very much into a specific cultural scene; thus using the word to express their love and investment in said scene.
You’ve definitely heard it before: “hardcore fan”. Yeah, that's where the “core” we see on TikTok everyday comes from.
The word has now evolved with the times. It has now shifted to mean, almost entirely, the same as the word ‘aesthetic’. Likely the result of language usage in social media platforms and their rapid spread, along with the late 2010’s increased focus users have had on their appearances online.
TikTok had somewhat warped the meaning of the word “aesthetics”. It itself has become a catch-all term used by Gen Z’s to encompass EVERYTHING. Ranging from moods, clothes, music, feelings, and subcultures around which anyone and everyone can find like-minded people on the internet. This platform has become so good at carving out little corners of the interest (especially designed for whatever niche-interest one has) that the way we live and coexist with the internet feels different than ever before - now it is about a lifestyle, an “aesthetic”.
Example of #blokecore. Taken from TikTok user. Account: @ezebee47
We have always been aware of the very possible human addiction to social media and the consequences of its ever-growing “importance” in our lives - but it is not hard for me to deny that I do feel like something has changed. It is just hard for me to say exactly what changed.
Of course, I think TikTok itself has changed the playing field entirely. Never before have we encountered a platform like this one.
Yet, as I write this, I think that the change that has happened - the one that doesn’t sit right with me and the one that scares me - is that the reach and side effects (for lack of a better word) of a platform like TikTok feel universal.
It begs the question, however, what changed between then and now?
What is the one thing - between then and now - that has happened to or affected absolutely EVERYONE in the world?
You know the answer even before I say it: the pandemic.
The Pandemic and the ‘Next Big Thing’: Welcome to “Future Shock”.
Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, famously wrote: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born”.
(The quote is followed by something about monsters walking the earth - but I don't think we are quite there just yet)
This became the unspoken (oftentimes spoken) slogan during the thick of the pandemic. Think pieces and endless musings of what this “next” world would look like. I mean, we have an excruciating minute-long video of various celebrities singing, asking us to IMAGINE what the world could possibly look like after COVID. Every single facet of human life was game for speculation on how it would change after the pandemic - from calling an uber, to gyms, school, brunch. Suddenly, the future became somewhat rebooted and everything would transform - what will things look and feel like once we can finally step outside? Yet, on the other side of the coin still remained those who patiently (or impatiently) waited for the “return to normalcy”. Whether you were one of those people who endlessly speculated on how everything would change, or one of those who (maybe naively) awaited the return to normalcy one thing is clear: both of these groups are characterised by the common dream of what will come next - the “next big thing”.
In 1970’s, famed futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler published their book titled “Future Shock”. The term is defined by the pair as “a certain psychological state of individual and entire societies”. The shortest definition provided in the book being “too much change in too short a period of time”.
The change described by the Tofflers, usually promoted by accelerated rates of technological and social change, is one that is so overwhelming that it leaves people disconnected from each other (and themselves) and suffering from a “shattering stress and disorientation” - this is future shock. Toffler describes an instance where his daughter, shopping in New York City, could not find a shop in its previous location, stating that New York has become “a city without a history”. Toffler uses the example of New York to illustrate the experience of living in a society with an increasing number of changes at an ever increasing rapidity. The argument is that, as technological advancements radically reconfigure our social life (particularly those of affluent societies in the global north) people’s senses become overwhelmed - the response to this overstimulation is “future shock”.
I suppose that the Toffler’s premise was that the shock caused by “future shock” was a result of a future that had already arrived. I’d argue that the future we mused on - the post pandemic future - hasn’t entirely arrived. The pandemic (as much as it was about COVID) was all about the next thing: be it going back to normal or “the new normal”, and what this would look like. However, it seems as if the past three years have all been about endless speculations about the future, one that has yet to come, a post-pandemic reality that surely must be better than what we had before.
As Mitch Therieu said, “It turns out that there is no one future so much as there is a series of ongoing crises smouldering in the background, distributed unevenly at every level”. The much-hyped “after” that was meant to come when the pandemic ended, the transformation period we would come out of like a butterfly from a chrysalis, arrives with no transformation - the “next big thing” is becoming increasingly hard to sell. The future we keep imagining is one characterised by a feeling of nausea and dizziness - the result of infinite possibilities. We are dancing on the edges of a cliff of a radically new future - throwing rocks down in an attempt to gauge how high up we are. The “next big thing” is coming, we just don't know when.
I was 21 years old through the majority of COVID. I was at an age of possibility, of discovery, of pushing boundaries - and yet I spent the year locked in my childhood bedroom waiting for the moment when I would be able to step back outside. The pandemic is “over” and suddenly the questions everyone is asking are: what are people wearing? What are people reading? What are people doing? What is the “next big thing”? As a result, the internet - TikTok in particular - is filled with speculations on what the next trends will be. Everything is compressed into a simple “-core” or a “-wave” to add to the roster of popular culture brought to us by the uncertainty of the pandemic years. These aesthetics/cores are impossible to keep up with, simply take a look at the crowdsourced “Aesthetics Wiki” - works more like a source catalogue than an internet encyclopaedia. It is almost as if the Wiki is a buffet of identity being presented to the reader in need of belonging. As Therieu pointed out, “these are not expressions of a unitary Next Thing, but discrete subcultural elements, soon to be superseded by another or others”. All of these “-cores” and “-waves” have spread out far and wide, much like COVID itself, and upon their spread only one thing becomes clear: there is no “next big thing”. There is only the waste that will be left behind after we are all done playing with our “-core” of choice.
These “-cores”, “-waves”, “aesthetics” or whatever you want to call them - they're the result of the future shock we are experiencing since coming out of the pandemic. Those years, although very much real, felt like the world was somewhat on pause: maybe because popular culture was not producing the same amount of entertainment throughout the pandemic? Be that as it may, when we all came out of our hiding places there was a sudden urge to “keep up” - the future is already here and we are far behind.
I believe that this is what has allowed hashtags like ‘corecore’ to come to prominence.
A popular example of #corecore. Taken from TikTok user. Account: @flicksaga
In a way, #corecore is a reflection of what it feels like to be alive today. Not only is it a great representation of how “meta” the internet has become - but it perfectly encapsulates the oversaturation we must live with in our everyday lives, waiting for the promised trend or product or aesthetic or core that will change it all. It is a heartfelt attempt at channelling the very-real ridiculousness of our everyday life. What it is like to turn on the news and see everything going downhill paired with the experience of things such as reality TV or pointless TikTok dances. The very real, very absurd reality we live in now where one can be scrolling through meme pages at the same time as a BBC notification pops up informing you of the current air strikes happening in Ukraine.
(Let me just add - for dark comedic effect, if you will - that just as I finished writing this sentence, a BBC notification just popped on my screen informing me of the recent developments in the war between Russia and Ukraine)
If “cores” and “aesthetics” are a result of an inherent, post-pandemic need to stabilise ourselves and feel grounded (via the consumption of things that add to / match your aesthetic), then is corecore a response to this futile attempt? Is corecore trying to make us stop burying our heads in the sand, for lack of a better word, and accept the collective feelings of impending doom and uncertainty that have been the only constant since COVID?
In a way, I think #corecore might be the first art form credited to Gen Z.
coreocre = dada?
When I first stumbled upon corecore, I didn’t know what to make of it. I liked the idea of it, it felt interesting, different (which is hard to do nowadays on the internet) and it wasn't trying hard.
At the time, I was taking a University module on Surrealism. Naturally, we had started the term talking about Dada and its beginnings, and upon learning about Dadaism I realised that, in some ways, corecore is much like it. Translated, the word “Dada” (a nonsensical term) applies to a series of unrelated terms and objects from across various languages - from “hobby horse” in French, to “father” in late 17th-century English, and even “cube” in certain Italian dialects. Dada stands for everything and nothing all at once, and it is precisely this absurd ungraspability that incited the movement and its members.
“Dada was not an artistic movement in the accepted sense; it was a storm that broke over the world of art as the war did over the nations. It came without warning, out of a heavy, brooding sky, and left behind it a new day in which the stored-up energies released by Dada were evidenced in new forms, new materials, new ideas, new directions, new people – and in which they addressed themselves to new people. Dada had no unified formal characteristics as have other style. But it did have a new artistic ethic from which, in unforeseen ways, new means of expression emerged. […] The new ethic took sometimes a positive, sometimes a negative form, often appearing as art and then again as the negation of art, at times deeply moral and at other times totally amoral.”
P.9, Hans Richter – Dada, Art and Anti-Art – Thames and Hudson, 1965.
Dada started in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire, the main driving force of Dada was the idea of “anti-art” - a leading piece of the movement being Duchamp’s 1917 readymade, Fountain. It was the beginning of the 20th century that had been kickstarter by a brutal world war, and Dadaists were questioning the role of art in such a world: how do you make art when the world is destroyed and suffering? What is there left but black humour and anarchy in the face of war? Nothing's the same, meaning art can’t be the same either.
Dada was all about this: the abolition of logic and social hierarchies that had been set up by the past world order - these values were impossible to preserve in that day and age. This is much like the feelings after COVID - what is left of the old world? Absolutely everything and everyone has changed. Just like Dada, corecore might push us to be asking the same things. Dada’s analogy of mirrors worked well in the society of the time: holding a mirror up to society, letting it reflect itself, and showing it how absurd the things that governed daily lives were.
Dada was about mocking, about antagonism, about disruption. And so is corecore. Through corecore’s amalgamation of “nonsensical” videos - it is doing the same thing that Dada tried to do back in its day: reinforce the lack of logic and the absurdity of our new world post war/pandemic. Just like Dada once did, corecore elevates the meaninglessness of our everyday - the endless experience of scrolling through social media - via the simple act of representing it. Corecore, like most of art, attaches meaning to the meaningless and arbitrary experiences we have as humans - be it going to a public restroom (like Duchamp) or endless doom scrolling on TikTok at 3 in the morning (like me).
Corecore denies us the escapism that social media otherwise grants us. Through the moving image and emotive music, corecore capitalises on TikTok’s infinite capacity for curation via the app's scarily precise algorithm in order to evoke feelings of existential dread. One corecore will show ASRM content next to a video of starving chimpanzees with Clint Mansell’s “Lux Aeterna” playing in the background. Through what could be the first raw art form to come from social media, corecore produces a meta commentary on how TikTok is, in itself, one of the top contributors to the general feelings of anxiety and addictive overstimulation that most of us experience in the digital age.
Nevertheless, Dada was a short lived movement. Breton moved away from it to write the Surrealist Manifesto (1924) - and slowly Dada faded away from the limelight as more and more artists flocked to Surrealism’s ranks. Which begs the question: will corecore die just as Dada once did?
I suppose the biggest threat to corecore's efficiency and lifespan as an art movement is the same threat of everything else online - going mainstream.
The Curse of the Mainstream
What makes corecore so interesting, what makes it a movement so full of possibility, is its ability to express the new feelings that we are collectively experiencing as a result of the digital / information age. Corecore does this almost parodically by highlighting the absurd yet overpowering experience of it all - it speaks to the common experience. It fits our generation perfectly.
It is hard to say how many videos sit under the hashtag - but it is undeniable that an increase in popularity might ruin the mission of corecore. One of the problems with any trend, when it becomes overly popular online (especially on TikTok), is that eventually the rat race to recreate content that's already trendy leads to dilution of the original purpose of the trend.
For the creator, it no longer becomes about the message but rather about the views, likes, about possibly blowing up online. And for the viewer, it might just be a self-serving fantasy: “I'm not like the rest of them because I liked this corecore video critiquing capitalism”. The videos aren't hard to make, the formula is simple and replicable. The fear is that corecore will just turn into another overused, boring, old trend that is no longer about anything other than the fake, plastic concerns of internet life: likes and shares.
Nevertheless, it is also important to question whether the internet and apps like TikTok are even designed for trends like this to grow and enact change. It is worth asking whether or not the saturation of the internet and of apps like TikTok that shove all of this content onto our faces in a matter of seconds (content that is also easily altered by what the algorithm thinks you want to see) allows for emerging trends / artforms like ‘corecore’ to cause any kind of impact?
It might be hard to say, but this screenshot of a comment section might sum it all up perfectly:
