Thanks to an unexpected surge in popularity on Tiktok, Radiohead has the fourth song ever on Billboard Hot 100: The Billosely Gorgeous Track on “Let Down” from the 1997 album “Ok Computer.”
“Let Down” never attracted mainstream attention like radio head “creep” or “Karma Police,” but it’s by no means a deep cut, as the pavement’s quirks of Spotify’s recommended algorithms “harness your hopes.” This Radiohead song is a fan favorite of the album, considered to be one of the greatest rock records of all time.
Unlike the rise of songs like Kate Bush’s “Runsing That Hill” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” the song doesn’t just serve as background music for make-up tutorials and recipe videos. Instead, people are stealing how songs are bothering you. It’s terribly sad, but there’s serious hope in it, and the desire to escape that grief makes the pain even more serious.
I first came across this trend when the Tiktok algorithm served me – the obsessive Philadelphia Phillies and Radiohead fans – used a video that seemed to have been created in the lab to make me cry. It’s Zach Wheeler’s montage, the unshakable ace of the Phillies’ pitching rotation, and will undergo season-ending surgery soon. It involves a choral editing of “Disappointment,” but the lyrics are overlaid on Wheeler’s highlight reels.
I’m almost relieved that this is not the case of Tiktok’s algorithm, which develops his own mind on a single-minded mission to destroy me (that’s not how AI works!).
Like editing clips from Hunger Games movies, all sorts of emotional videos are set to “disappoint.” The song was boosted when it was used to win a scene in the season 1 finale of “The Bear,” and in May, the Music Tiktok account posted an edit of “Let Down” with a massive chorus vocals. That version of the song appears in many of these videos.
“Make the saddest edits ever with this overlay,” reads the video caption. Over 1 million likes! There is.
According to Google Trends, interest in songs began to surge in the spring, steadily rising to this point, when it became popular enough to enter the Billboard charts.
