No one on TikTok in the North Sea seems to know how they got there. They’re just innocently scrolling through their feeds, from dance challenges to gardening tips to relationship updates to workout videos to stand-up comedy clips, and suddenly, they’re plunged into some of the most dangerous waters on the planet.
The videos are almost always the same: 60 seconds of waves crashing against the hull of an unsuspecting ship, workers dangling from an oil rig while a storm rolls around them, and water rushes onto the ship’s deck so fast, You can’t imagine how even the camera survived. “I don’t know why my feed is filled with North Sea videos,” a thousand commenters always say, “but I love it.”
I can’t say exactly how this trend started (because TikTok’s platform-finding tools are so terrible), but I’m pretty sure most people found Beihai TikTok like I did. On November 27, 2023, a video of the North Sea was posted by an account called @ukdestinations, which has spent years showing viewers unexpected and cool things around the UK. It’s titled “The final sequence will truly shock you” and the opening screen reads “The North Sea: The World’s Most Dangerous Ocean”.
For more information about Beihai TikTok, check out this episode of edge broadcast.
TikTok now has more than 118 million views and was at least one of the first apps to adopt the editing and editing that is now central to the TikTok aesthetic.Even its creators are surprised by its popularity: James Cullen, one of the creators of the @ukdestinations account, told us New York Times He was “absolutely shocked by the popularity of these films,” with audiences coming from all over the world. (As I was researching this story, no one behind the account got back to me.)
But the most important thing about @ukdestinations post is the soundtrack. It starts with a moment of silence, enough to grab your attention amid the sea of TikTok noise, and then, the bass kicks in. “Yo ho, everybody, hands up.” For the next minute, the song is deep, low, and terrifying, an ode to the ocean, death, and survival.
“The music is so painful,” one commenter wrote on the original video. Another netizen said: “Imagine you are in the middle of the ocean at night and suddenly hear this song.” “This song is scarier than the video,” said a third.
Somehow I ended up deep into Beihai TikTok, and those videos and YO HO are all over my For You page. Soon, I started seeing the same song on TikTok about mythical monsters, phobias, storms, and other things that cause your palms to sweat and your body to suddenly become very still. The 60-second clip has become the unofficial soundtrack to TikTok’s horror side.
The song is a cover of a tune from the memorable 2007 film Hoist The Colors Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. The sound in the movie goes like this:
It’s a weird song from the early scenes at the end of the world A group of pirates (and those suspected of colluding with them) were to be hanged. A child starts singing on the gallows, and soon everyone on death row seems to be singing along. After that, something happens to Jack Sparrow and the movie picks up.
Bobby Waters has always loved this song. Waters is a musician and a college student (circa 2020) who enjoys singing this kind of song. It fit perfectly with his deep, booming voice. “They’re very bassy songs, these slow, minor-key songs that are almost ballads, like sea shanties.” Waters started posting on TikTok during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns and discovered two niche songs on the app. Base market: Ocean shacks like “Soon May the Wellerman Come” are suddenly everywhere on TikTok, as is the trend for bass singers to add bass parts on TikTok. Viral song.
Waters began performing duets and adding bass lines to his favorite videos, which began to perform well. One of his early hits was a cover of – you guessed it! — “Hoist the Colors” with a singer named Malinda Kathleen Reese, who became very popular singing about sea shanties. He went viral again, adding bass to a stairwell rendition of Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time.” He has been building sea shanties and the shanties have been doing very well.
TikTok as a platform rewards ruthless trend following. Pick a trend or a sound, jump on it, and trust the algorithm to take you far. Waters certainly did some of that—after all, he was part of a band called The Wellermen, which got a record deal in the wake of the shantytown craze. But he swears he didn’t set out to score the internet’s creepiest video. It just happened.
It was mid-2022, and Waters had recently participated in a series of duets, adding parts to another cover song, “Hoist the Colors.” He recorded his parts not just once, but nearly a dozen times, layering all the audio into his duet. The video worked well, people loved it, and commenters started asking for the full version.
“One morning,” Waters said, “I don’t know why, I just woke up, and as soon as I woke up, I was like, ‘What the heck, let’s do this.'” He sat down at his computer and started creating a video on TikTok. Email some other bass singers. He ended up with six other countrymen with deep voices, all TikTok users. Waters choreographed the track for all seven voices — “I spent a few weeks arranging this piece because I like to take my time,” he says, in a world where a few weeks is just a matter of time on TikTok. Slowly – and then send each singer having several parts to sing. All seven singers recorded each of their parts several times and uploaded them to a shared Google Drive folder. “If we had seven voices and layered them,” Waters said, “it would sound cool, but there are tons of options for all of those voices to be layered and sound like a choir. We can’t do it all together. Singing, because we’re all over the world, we just recorded a ton of different tracks.”
“I wanted the song to sound like a giant ship loaded with mountains rowing through a dangerous sea.”
Waters finished the song, enlisting the help of a few friends to provide some intro strings and some mastering experience, and had a song completed in no time. It feels big, it feels ominous, it feels powerful. “I wanted the song to sound like a giant ship loaded with mountains rowing through a dangerous sea,” he said. “It was like the earthquake was singing.” He considered adding a higher-pitched part to the melody, but ultimately wanted to let the bass do the job. “I want everyone to feel how much bass you can put into something,” Waters said. “The bass cuts so hard, you feel it right in your chest. I really like that feeling.”
Waters created a music video to go with the song on YouTube, then uploaded the track to Soundrop, a platform that can distribute your music to nearly every music and social platform you can think of. He even came up with a (uninspired) name for the group: TikTok’s Bass Singers. The song premiered on YouTube on September 23, 2022. For over a year, it’s been doing…very well. There were no viral moments, no new record deals or late-night appearances, but it was Waters’ most successful YouTube debut to date and a powerful launch for her band of TikTok friends. Regardless, Waters didn’t even really pay attention to how the song was doing on social media. He made a TikTok and then a full song, and the full song was the song he cared about most.
More than a year later, Beihai TikTok took off. There have been some remarks like “The North Sea is scary!” Previous videos, some even had similar waves, but things really started to move forward in early November when the @ukdestinations video was released. According to TikTok, videos with #northsea were viewed a total of 2.9 billion times, with 2.2 billion of those views coming from early November to early January. During this period, the number of views increased by 315%. On #northseatiktok, TikTok has a total of 109.5 million views, including 98.9 million views during the same period. A big thing happened in Beihai TikTok, and it happened suddenly.
#northsea’s videos have a total of 2.9 billion views
Waters started noticing “Hoist The Colors” taking off in two ways: The number of streams on YouTube, Spotify and elsewhere started growing faster, and he started getting text messages from friends who had just nonchalantly scrolled to A chilling video of his roaring bass heard beneath it. The song currently has nearly 8 million views on YouTube and nearly 12 million views on Spotify. (When you search for “Hoist The Colors” on Spotify, the bassist’s version appears above the original.)
Meanwhile, on TikTok, more than 197,000 videos were created using the same 60-second clip from “Hoist The Colors.” This is the North Sea; it’s “the world’s scariest doll”; it’s “NASA has a megalodon”; sometimes the film has nothing to do with any of that, it’s just trying to catch the viral wave. The song ranked No. 5 on TikTok’s Viral 50 chart and No. 26 on the overall Top 50 chart. Interestingly, TikTok has slowed down a bit, at least on my For You feed, but “Hoist The Colors” is still everywhere. It’s so big that pop creators like Chris Olson would probably get mad at having the song in their own videos, and people know exactly what they’re talking about. There are even parodies of covers now, which is how you know you’ve really made it.
Waters said he wasn’t trying to exploit that, or find other places in TikTok that needed big bass. He has other projects, other sea shanties, other things to do. He hadn’t even heard of “Hoist the Colors” much lately. But he seems to love that the song has found the perfect home online. “You have these huge ships,” he said, “and you have these huge sirens and whales and stuff like that, and if you imagine them talking, that’s not what it looks like,” and here he modulates his voice. Smaller, raised an octave, “‘Hi, I’m a whale! You imagine something huge.” Those deep waters and deep sounds make you feel something – Waters just wants everyone to feel Can feel it.
Just before Waters and I hung up the phone, I asked him hypothetically, what would you do if you were to ruthlessly chase trends, and do it over and over again? He thought for a moment. Then he had his truly great idea. “Perhaps there will be a little happy bass mass next year?” Watch your back, Maria. TikTok’s bass singer is here.
