Doechii’s “Anxiety” shows how TikTok is tilting toward celebrity

Rapper Doechii’s song “Anxiety” is everywhere right now. It is, of course, almost entirely thanks to TikTok. But what’s fascinating is how differently “Anxiety” has been performing on the app compared to previous viral hits. Tracing how “Anxiety” went from an obscure single to a global phenomenon might be the best evidence yet that one era of TikTok has ended and a new one has begun.

“Anxiety” was released in 2019 on YouTube, years before Doechii would go on to have chart-topping, Grammy-winning success. On her YouTube channel, the original video, as well as a reupload a year later, didn’t get the same attention as her later hits, especially since it wasn’t initially released on music streaming platforms — likely because it samples 2010s mega-viral hit “Somebody That I Used to Know,” by Gotye and Kimbra. Before the frenzy this year, the closest “Anxiety” ever came to an official release was ending up as a sample, itself, in a song by the rapper Sleepy Hallow in 2023. But the song stayed fairly obscure. 

Archives of the videos show that at the beginning of the year, the original had less than 50,000 views on YouTube, and the reupload had less than 200,000. All of that changed for the same reason Doechii’s career took off in the first place: TikTok. 

On February 14, user @cuervothegoat uploaded the largely forgotten video and optimized it for the platform, turning the originally horizontal video into something that looked better vertical for mobile devices. Over the next two weeks, it took TikTok by storm. According to The Tab, over 40,000 videos used the sound by the end of the month, with thousands more using other recordings of the song. Every one of the videos, whether they recreated Doechii’s “Fresh Prince”-inspired dance or just reused the song, was filled with comments begging Doechii to release an official version.

On February 28, Doechii announced on TikTok that she would be rerecording and officially releasing “Anxiety.” The new version dropped on March 4 and became her biggest release ever, debuting at No. 2 on Spotify’s global charts. It was streamed over 130 million times in its first month. Her original YouTube uploads of the song gained millions of views, as well, on top of over 30 million for the new, official video. All of this was being driven by TikTok.

The official sound was used in over 100,000 videos on the short-form video platform in its first month, making it the single most popular sound of the year, TikTok’s own analytics show. And the users who had plucked a hit from the depths of Doechii’s back catalog kept up their end of the bargain, though they saw only a tiny sliver of the same attention from it. Since the song was released, @cuervothegoat received approximately 2 million more likes on the video that started the trend, but Doechii’s announcement alone received more than 4x that amount, not even counting the song itself. 

This is where we’ve noticed a key difference in how TikTok functions.

Up until recently, TikTok not only didn’t favor established celebrities — they were almost never present on Garbage Day’s monthly lists of top videos and hashtags — but the app also tended to favor smaller users who originated a trend. In fact, this was even true for Doechii herself. She is one of thousands of musicians who got their start on TikTok. The app’s emphasis on music and a completely algorithmic feed put unknown singers and songwriters on an equal footing with some of the biggest names in the industry. 

Since then, like many social networks before it, TikTok’s higher prominence has shifted its priorities toward the people who are already at the top. Would “Anxiety” be a trend without Doechii’s Best Rap Album win and lauded performance at the Grammys two weeks earlier? Probably not. And the strongest piece of evidence is the even bigger star who got even more attention off “Anxiety” than Doechii did.

Will Smith wasn’t sampled in Doechii’s song, but the dance that accompanied the song’s TikTok virality was inspired by an episode of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” When Smith posted the original clip to his TikTok account the day after Doechii officially released the song, it got more attention than her announcement did. A week later, they officially collaborated, with two videos of Doechii, Will, and Tatyana Ali of “Fresh Prince” earning more than 100 million views and over 20 million likes on the platform.

These weren’t just the most popular videos on TikTok to feature the song — they were the two biggest videos on the whole platform for the month of March.

It’s hard not to see this shift from favoring smaller users to amplifying accounts that are already large as being directly tied to TikTok’s nebulous existence following its not-quite-ban earlier this year. This is a strategy that shows up time and time again from social networks that want to play it safe. Instagram has tried its own version of this recently, too. 

But it’s especially noticeable on TikTok because it’s a reversal of one of the core features of the platform. It also means that even if the app gives us a new hit like “Anxiety,” we might not know the name of the user that did all the work to make it trend.

Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. We’ll be sharing some of our findings here on Sherwood News. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.