On the Clock: TikTok Music Q2 2025
Offering some thoughts on the music buzzing on the app, from AiScream, M!LK, Sayumi Michishige and more
This column is part of This Side of Japan #94. You can return to the main newsletter here.
Six months since its release, “Ai Scream!” has lived so many lives once its live-call section of a bridge spread on the app, and the memes have become progressively more bizarre with each evolution. I am not going to explain the song, the group behind it or the initial breakout of the meme here; I’ll let our friend of the newsletter Patrick St. Michel do that for you. Instead, I want to share my favorite twisted iterations I’ve seen on the app these past few months, roughly in chronological order in which I’ve come across them.
“Ai Scream!” by AiScReam (2025)
THE EDITS, TRADITIONAL: In traditional TikTok fashion, the song became a popular track for edits, acting as a cutesy filter to overlay on someone’s showcase of their pop faves. As the song grew in visibility on the app through its adjacent meme of people lip-syncing the live call spreading more and more, the subject of these edits started to stray further away from the pop-music constellation in a semi-ironic way. While my first encounter of this genre of the meme highlighted LeBron James, the most can’t-help-but-laugh version that I saw featured cardinals who were candidate hopefuls to be the next Pope at the time.
THE EDITS, THE SCREAMS: As the meme spread, people began to narrow the focus of its punchline on the haaai! portion of the live call, the response from each of the voice actresses when her respective character’s name gets called. Soon, the edit-makers spliced clips of their pop faves and inserted some of the most obnoxious screams done by them in place of the actual live call and response. I’m fond of this Twice one where after each introduction of Chaeyoung, Nayeon and Momo, you hear the most ridiculous squawk, squeal and howl to ever come out of each of them.
PLANES, TRAINS, AUTOMOBILES: The two above genre of memes fused and mutated into one warped strain, where the subject of the edit became a motor vehicle with the loudest klaxon. My local public transit system for example posted one of their trolley trains, and where Ai Furihata would be answering haaai! in the song is interrupted by a deafening horn. I don’t know why they have a TikTok account either!
KLAXON AS PRANK: I want to think this next step was inspired by the horrifically loud meme above, but by the spread of this portion, the original lip-syncing version of the meme was well known enough that if you caught someone’s attention with the song while recording a TikTok, that person would know the drill on what to do for the meme and be able to join in. However, people started to prank these unassuming bystanders with a different version of the audio where instead of Ai Furihata’s haaai!, you heard a blaring car horn in a volume that honestly demands a warning label for the viewers at home. These poor subjects are absolutely stunned, their expressions frozen, lost. (Here is QWER’s Chodan, half asleep, harassed by Magenta with this ear-splitting meme—again, please be careful because it is loud!)
“AISCREAM” DANCE ROUTINES: It’s actually amazing it took this far into the song’s lifecycle on the app for me to come across dance routines done with it in sincere appreciation of the song for song’s sake. Maybe it has come full circle, back around to pure music. And after all the wild path it has gone, “AiScream” needs a re-appreciation for what it is: a pretty good anison single. The track’s entire front half gets no attention, especially its intro arrangement, which is a shame since it should please anyone fond of anime-adjacent electro-pop from the early 2010s, like ClariS’s stuff produced by kz of livetune.
But don’t mistake this recommendation as me being sick of the section that started this whole craze. I’m an idol fan after all, and I’m a sucker for when idol songs feature non-traditional elements as a hook or bridge like, as of recent, CUTIE STREET’s new single where they abruptly stop the track to play a game of Red Light, Green Light. I can go for another half of the year of Ai Furihata screaming haaai and the mad memes it will inevitably inspire on the app.
And if you can give me a moment, I want to offer thoughts on a few more songs that I’ve come across my TikTok feed these few months.
“E Jan” by M!LK [Victor, 2025]
Through March and April, nothing in J-pop entertained me more than seeing M!LK go viral with their single, “E Jan.” Not long after the group’s debut performance of the song on CDTV Live! Live!, netizens picked up on the echoes to K-pop in its jump-cut of a chorus. Many had fun grafting NMIXX’s chants to signal the abrupt shift from princely orchestral pop to dead-serious electro like how the girl group announce the beat switch in their mashed-up debut, “O.O.”
The topic of conversation quickly went from doesn’t it sound like K-pop? to doesn’t it sound like aespa’s “Whiplash”?, thanks to the bass line of “E Jan” bearing some resemblance. There’s certainly a passing similarity between the two in vibe. (If you know the aespa song, you probably don’t need to watch the “Whiplash” video with the music swapped with “E Jan” to get the point, but here it is anyway.) But why deny yourself from indulging in a fun, silly pop chorus over some alleged likeness with another K-pop hit?
The chorus in question is so tonally opposite from what comes before. “E Jan” initially follows through with a flowery arrangement that’s as tender as M!LK’s devotion for their One and Only. But as if the boys sense their love isn’t getting across anymore in their usual ways, they ditch the sweetness to deliver it a way they have yet to try. As the track leaves only a throbbing bass line behind them, the idols wears a cool swagger that fits them like a backwards baseball cap on a suit-and-tie outfit to tell it straight-up: “hey, aren’t you looking good?” The chorus comes in like the song was suddenly interrupted by a YouTube ad running promo for an entirely different boy group, yet the transition is far from seamless precisely for the group to make their point.
While it loses this relationship with its surrounding sections when clipped as a standalone piece for the app, the chorus on its own still radiates a self-awareness of its own silliness. The deadpan tone. The quasi-slang of the titular lyric. And of course, the point dance, which exudes the cockiness of someone flexing, who’s got 2 thumbs and the hottest in the room? This guy! As users lean into the jokey feel, they also give a genuinely conceited smug through it all, letting the novelty deflect any perceived self-seriousness. Burikko idols unsurprisingly deliver this meme best: they know a thing or two about being cunning about their look-at-me gestures.
By the end of March, the meme has started to morph from a promotion of its choreography into something more abstract. The titular lyric seeped more and more into daily dialogue, eliciting a kind of reflex not only with the actual phrase of viju iijan but any other word with the -jan suffix. Not long after “E Jan” circulated, I saw an idol joke, “are? Okane naijan! [Wait, I don’t have any money!],” half-singing it in the same cadence as the song, while doing the thumbs-up move in front of a vending machine with her empty wallet. For a brief period, M!LK had a mental monopoly on the word iijan with their hit “E Jan” germinating in today’s meme-tapped minds.
M!X is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.
“Knock Knock” by Pilaf Alien [self-released, 2024]
The sugary video-game synths and keyboard strings of Pilaf Alien’s “Knock Knock faintly evoke plugg, if not echoing all the way back around to swag rap. But it’s at best the end product after a game of Telephone, maybe by part design. The song’s producer Omamurin uploads dozens of type beats, so they’re used to crafting beats that gesture at a gesture of a style.
I’m more compelled to label “Knock Knock” as plugg because of another type-beats producer: Zachz Winner. “Introducing the Pluggnb genre to NCS, he continues to define this new sound with each releases,” No Copyright Sounds wrote about the producer’s debut, “blu,” for the label. His song “doodle” blew up last year thanks to a dance meme, and his other tracks sporting similar 8-bit melodies continue to inspire new dances on TikTok. A feed filled with Winner’s synth jingles is where Pilaf Alien’s “Knock Knock” lives, and if the former is pluggnb as promoted by NCS, the latter starts to be plugg by sheer association, however intentional the resemblance.
NCS categorizes Zachz Winner’s tracks as pluggnb yet, along with “Knock Knock,” the subgenre initially didn’t come to mind for me when I’d come across these songs while scrolling through my general feed. They instead bled into my feed’s larger neon synth-pop milieu informed by ILLIT’s arcade-game Atlanta bass, Perfume’s Shibuya-kei-tinged electro-pop, and many PinkPantheress knockoffs. After constant exposure, this kind of Game Boy vibe has solidified into a kind of TikTok-core style to my mind, and the beat of “Knock Knock” fits right into it through a similar set of sounds.
I don’t know how much Pilaf Alien is actually inspired by acts from Japan’s internet-rap underground like, say, gokou kuyt. Considering the stronger dance influence over actual rap in his new album Dream Taxi, I wouldn’t be surprised if he leaned into the glowed-up sound in “Knock Knock” not so much for the plugg hype than the exposure from being online.
But how “Knock Knock” hints at the larger internet mainstream gets me returning to a constant question of mine. I often wonder how much of Japanese rap’s taste for plugg is influenced from the actual Soundcloud rap scene of the late ‘10s, and how much of it owes to the adjacent music communities in the site around the same time. The bit-crushed synths on these rap tracks recall the swag rap and plugg but also chiptune and future bass—filled with kitchen-sink electro drops and helium-shot vocals—that set the impression of internet-made J-pop for a while. As they all exist in this grand ecosystem, these glittery pop tracks don’t seem too far apart from one another.
Dream Taxi is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.
“chiigyuu” by Sayumi Michishige [UP-FRONT WORKS, 2024]
Hello! Project should be proud to see its lyrical signature be the source of the popularity behind this Sayumi Michishige song. Many on the app are lip-syncing to the in-song monologue where the former Morning Musume complains about not receiving the appropriate compliment. “Don’t say, ‘you look cute no matter what your age’! I put in effort to look cute!” She goes off. “I look cute because I’m so-and-so years old. That’s a given! Don’t make me say it! No, you say it! It should be, ‘you also look cute today.’ Right?” The tone is a degree shy from aggressively demanding, yet it comes out like natural dialogue from Michishige, the prime burikko idol of her time.
The not-so-passive-aggressive demeanor in which Michishige pines for attention lets “chiigyuu” fits right in with other J-pop seemingly designed for users to fashion its attention-hungry hooks to fish for Likes. Lyrically blunt as she is deeply clingy about her crushes, Koresawa competes with Michishige’s level of assertiveness among the app’s attention economy. The titular hook to the singer-songwriter’s recent hit is basically don’t you dare cheat on me. But despite the lyrics being sung in the brash dialect of Kansai-ben, the song is otherwise bubbly as any cutesy idol-pop through its shiny brass arrangement and Koresawa’s airy vocal cadence—a fluff of naivete that turns the bitterness to sound more sweet and affectionate.
I find a mutually shared influence of Seiko Oomori in Koresawa, “chiigyuu” and this greater jiraikei pool existing in the app. Oomori wrote Michishige’s song, and while the fast-paced lyrical cadence is reverent to the singer’s idol roots as with her own love for idol music, the candid language comes wholly from her playbook. Her voice as a writer earlier in her career—say, the days of “Zettai Kanojo”— doesn’t seem so different from Koresawa’s: emotionally frank, desperately attached, and unafraid to express themselves as such. Perhaps Oomori’s songs are less optimized for the app’s landscape with her music and lyrics a tad too stuffed; none of her songs have yet to catch much traction as Koresawa’s. The personality introduced in her songs, though, feels defining to the environment in which songs by the likes of Koresawa and Michishige thrive.
…from SAYUMINGLANDOLL Mine To Pango (2024). Listen to it on Spotify.
“Yachin Ga Hanbun?” by Tomoki Hasegawa [VAP, 2006]
I know I’ve grown old whenever I wonder what the younger generation will start to collect from the recent past as a novelty item akin to how the generation before mine might have looked at our fondness for record players or Polaroid cameras—pieces of old media that its initial adopters seemingly left behind for something newer. Nostalgia had always been around for music and photography media, so digital cameras from the 2000s made some sense as an item that draws in the youth. It’s progressive from the instant cameras in terms of the timeline of the technologies, and the low resolution read now as a charm than a flaw. MP3 players, too, I get. I’ve seen more than a few teenagers using CD players, and so a leap into an MP3 player seem natural as it did in its day.
I don’t know why I was not prepared to see also a renewed interest in flip phones. For a few years now, people have been showing off new models from the likes of Kyocera, Nokia and Docomo very reminiscent of what was popular in the 2000s, quite a few of them decorated with gems and charms like from the time, too. At least from what pops up on my feed, the Y2K romantics behind these collections adore the Japanese in the phones—the bigger, rectangular gara-keis—but also the music for their showcases. A good amount of them are synced to chilled-out trance, garage and jungle, many from anonymous track-makers channeling video games like Ridge Racer or Sonic the Hedgehog; or posh Shibuya-kei instrumentals like this one by Tomoki Hasegawa for the anime NANA. Some of them blend the two into a kind of neo-vaporwave that functions as PlayStation menu-screen BGM and lo-fi beats to study to.
After a few look into the collections, I… kind of want one? Or just ooh-ahh at a real physical model as a toy more than use it for its actual functions. I’m very nostalgic for the variety of cell-phone models available on the market before the proliferation of the iPhone—I say this as an iPhone holder myself. And I imagine the personalization is what draws people into these phones along with them simply gaining a vintage cool now thanks to nostalgia.
…from NANA 707 soundtracks (2006). Listen to it on Spotify.
Other notable songs on my TikTok feed from March to June:
Ariana Grande - “supernatural” (2024)
Cho Tokimeki Sendenbu - “Chosaikyo” (2024)
Fuma No KTR ft. bunTes - “Buzzer Beats” (2023)
GloRilla ft. Boston Richey - “Bad Bih 4 Ya” (2024)
HANA - “ROSE” (2025)
=LOVE - “Tokubechu, Shite” (2025)
Meimi Tamura - “Mukei Yukei” (2019)
MOLIY, Shenseea, Skillibeng, Silent Addy - “Shake It to the Max (Fly) (Remix)” (2025)
NENE ft. Elle Teresa - “BANANA BOAT” (2024)
RoddOnnaBeat - “Stick Em 2k20” (2024)
SAWTONE ft. Hatsune Miku - “M@GICAL CURE! LOVE SHOT!” (2024)
SUPER YANKEES - “Okori Mark” (2025)
Yuki Chiba - “Shinpin Muji T” / “Omote” (2024)
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