TikTok’s latest musical obsession is a country song. But not the kind that first comes to mind.
Miles removed from the weather-beaten earnestness of Zach Bryan, or Bailey Zimmerman’s heart-on-sleeve crooning, the viral “10 Drunk Cigarettes” is plasticky, poppy, alien and seemingly A.I.-assisted. Its lyrics advocate for a carefree, resolutely American way of life, although they replace Nashville standards like beers and Bibles with cigarettes and copious amounts of cocaine, and find humor (and plenty of shock value) in their clash of saccharine femininity and unbridled nihilism. The result is like the cult comedy “Strangers With Candy” or the early web series “The Most Popular Girls in School” for the short-form video generation.
“10 Drunk Cigarettes” is by Girly Girl Productions: a mysterious trio supposedly based in St. Louis that seem to have a preternatural ability to turn ironic, startlingly contemporary internet humor into music. Most Girly Girl songs follow a brutally effective structure: an intro verse about how empowered women are, followed by a chorus about using that power to do something horrifyingly self-destructive, in a tone that vaguely echoes the “God forbid women have hobbies” meme.
Not every Girly Girl song is indebted to country, but its most ingratiating ones, like “Notes App Girls!” and “Coked Up Friend Adventure!” feel rooted in the genre. “10 Drunk Cigarettes,” which has gained the most traction on TikTok and streaming, combines the smiley feminized empowerment of RaeLynn’s “Bra Off” — which likens a breakup to “takin’ my bra off” — with the boozy escapism of Chase Rice and Florida Georgia Line’s “Drinkin’ Beer. Talkin’ God. Amen.”
“10 Drunk Cigarettes” is not dissimilar from that collaboration in structure and arrangement. It’s built around a rhythmic acoustic guitar line and surges to an anthemic chorus structured as a list. But it’s not the kind of song that will be getting played on country radio anytime soon. TikTok is filled with videos of people reacting, mouths agape, to its chorus: “I can name 10 things us girls need before we ever need a man/One new vape/Two lines of coke/Free drinks from the bar/Four more lines of coke” — and so on.
The very first line of “Demure,” Girly Girl’s debut album, makes a statement: “Haters mad ’cause my music is A.I./Wish I cared, but I’m way too high.” While many vocals on the album are wobbly and lo-fi in a way that recalls the fake songs by Drake and the Weeknd that proliferated last year, it’s unclear how much of Girly Girl’s songs are A.I.-generated; it’s unlikely that tracks like these could be made without a high level of human involvement. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
Girly Girl’s songs tap into a vein of humor that’s firmly of-the-moment. Their glib jokes about vaping, drinking, drug taking and trauma — and, specifically, how those things relate to, or form an essential part of, “girlhood” — are the kinds of jokes going viral on X, formerly Twitter, every day. “Demure” was released last month, and even its title (which refers to a TikTok trend about being “very demure, very mindful” that blew up and faded away within the last few weeks) points to a desire for immediate relevance at the expense of longevity.
It’s a kind of humor that’s endemic online, yet rarely spreads into spaces beyond X — but this year has proved an exception. Over the past few months, Charli XCX’s “Brat” and its associated “Brat summer” aesthetic brought images of emotional messiness and unbridled hedonism to the forefront of culture. Girly Girl’s songs wouldn’t land without the context of “girlhood memes,” which associate being a girl with both twee brightness (Barbies, sparkles, dancing) and abject darkness (trauma, depression, violent outbursts).
Girly Girl’s music captures this with blunt, accessible language, but it’s a mode that other, more niche musicians have explored in recent years, too. The streaming curio Naomi Elizabeth — whose unnerving outsider pop has found a small but passionate audience on Spotify and Reddit — sings about traditional femininity, God and brazen sexuality on tracks like “God Sent Me Here to Rock You” and “I’m Your Angel”; last year, the synth-pop singer Neoliberalhell released a stomach-churning bubble gum track titled “Lolita Express,” which grafts ’00s pop-style clothing worship onto lyrics about Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, taking ironic girlhood’s uneasy fusion of brightness and chaos to its disconcerting endpoint.
Part of why Girly Girl’s music is more effective is because it is finely tuned on both musical and cultural levels, aggregating darkly toned internet humor into a package that clearly resonates with (or, at least, has the capacity to reach) a gigantic audience.
Its leaning on country music is savvy, too. TikTok has fewer roadblocks and rules than Nashville — a fact Lil Nas X exploited with “Old Town Road,” which blew up on the platform in 2019. Cracks in the fortress have since allowed artists like Zimmerman, Priscilla Block, Megan Moroney and Lainey Wilson entry into the genre’s center, and Beyoncé and Post Malone have made their mark, too. But TikTok stands out as a breeding ground for experimentation — and potential disruption.
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