Formal Analysis of TikTok Dance Trend “Renegade”

TikTok is a social media app where you can make short videos and post them on your page. TikTok has made its way into one of the most used apps over the past couple of years. It is used just as much or more than apps such as snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter. In this digital age almost, everyone has some sort of phone and can access all of these apps. TikTok was originally called Musical.ly and was made in 2014. But in November of 2017 Musical.ly was acquired by a Chinese company called Byte Dance and then changed the name from Musicl.ly into TikTok.

The app was originally supposed to target teenagers but now almost everyone uses it. I’ve seen little kids, moms and dads, even grandparents. The app grew exponentially during the beginning of the pandemic. The most popular creators would usually only have about 1 million followers, maybe 2 million. But now it seems that 1 or 2 million followers isn’t really all that. The person on TikTok with the most followers now has over 100 million followers. That’s crazy but it goes to show how many people really use the app. TikTok has become a community where people can interact, share, and just be themselves with others all over the world but it can also be hard to get credit for ideas that are your own.

These are just a few people on TikTok who are in the top ten TikTokers with the most followers.

TikTok has a lot of different types of videos. But some of the most popular categories on TikTok are cooking, transition, dancing, and etc. Whichever out of those TikToks you show more interest in shows up on your page. I personally enjoy all three of these categories and these are the only videos that are usually on my for you page. For this assignment though I am going to focus on the dancing category. The dances on TikTok are a huge part of TikTok and I don’t think the app would be the same without them. It brings people who don’t even know each other together. Someone could be making a TikTok in public and a random stranger will join in just because they know the dance or they’ll hype them up. The songs that have dances made to them are also really catchy so they could be stuck in your head and the minute you decide to sing out loud someone will join you because that’s just how popular TikTok dances are. Even if you don’t want to know a song you hear it so much that you don’t have a choice. One of the big dance trends that I think that had a big mark on TikTok was Renegade.

Here is a TikTok of Jalaiah Harmon doing her original Renegade dance.

Renegade was one of the biggest trends that has ever been on TikTok. The original choreography was created by a 14-year-old girl at the time named Jalaiah Harmon. She made the choreography to the song Lottery by K Camp and originally posted it to funimate and then Instagram. Then someone saw her dance and changed up a few of her moves and posted them doing it to TikTok. Shortly after the dance went viral, TikTok’s of people doing this dance eventually made its way to Instagram and Twitter as well. Not only was it spreading to other social media platforms but people we’re doing it in the halls or classrooms of their school, out in public, and even celebrities jumped onto the trend. Even though Jalaiah originally made the dance, she didn’t get credit for the longest even after trying to comment under other influencers on the app asking for credit. Dances are almost impossible to legally claim unlike how you can copyright music. With how TikTok has grown so much, Jalaiah could have made money off of her dance because TikTok actually pays pretty nice when you’ve gone viral.

The Original Renegade (Published 2020)

This wasn’t the only time that there was an issue with giving dance credits but after this incident it was made known that when creators do a dance that isn’t their own they need to tag the creator of the dance when posting videos. When someone creates a dance on TikTok it’s hard to find the original video or creator especially if they don’t have a lot of followers. When you go under a sound on TikTok, they put the videos in order usually of most likes to least likes. So, this goes to show when a creator isn’t popular its harder to find them. In Jalaiah’s case, Charli D’Amelio who is the person on TikTok with the most followers was getting all of the hype for Renegade.

Here are a few of the many comments calling Charli out under multiple videos of her doing the Renegade.

After being called out all over TikTok and other social medias for not giving credit, she finally gave Jalaiah her credit and they did a collab along with TikTok star Addison Rae. This video went viral. In the captions they introduced her as the original creator of the Renegade dance. Many creators we happy that Jalaiah finally got the credit she deserved.

Addison Rae, Jalaiah Harmon, and Charli D’Amelio do the original renegade dance together.

Here are a couple comments of the many of creators showing how happy they are for Jalaiah to finally have received her credit.

After this big incident there haven’t been any more issues with creators not getting their credit. It became a common thing to tag the original creators of dances in the captions. It has also become a common thing to just give creators their credit for their videos in general. If someone makes the same video as someone else 9 times out of 10 they give the person who originally came up with it credit and if they don’t know who that person is the TikTok community as a whole works together to find the person and give credit where it’s due.

When it comes to the internet and social media I think sharing ideas can be dangerous sometimes. Everyone wants to be creative and create their own stuff but as Kirby Ferguson said in his Everything is a Remix Remastered video “the base elements of creativity are copying, transforming, and combining.” We see a lot of this on TikTok, someone will take someone else’s video and change it up a little bit. Another example of this is when people mash together songs that have dances to somewhat create something new. Which this actually happens a lot.

Here is an example of a TikTik mashing up a few songs that have popular dances to them to kind of create something new.

But as I said before dances are almost impossible to legally get credit for unlike a song. On any social media if there is some sort of copyright they take down your video immediately. That’s where remixing has been able to kind of take root. People make remixes of songs but in this case a dance was “remixed”. The creator that brought Jalaiah’s dance to TikTok just changed it up a little bit, but he still should have given credit to her. TikTok has an unlimited number of examples of remixing, Renegade was just one of the most obvious ones and it helped to establish that everyone deserves their credit for what they create. TikTok has become a community where people can interact, share, and just be themselves with others all over the world but it can also be hard to get credit for ideas that are your own.