TikTok’s ‘corecore’: Scrolling through the voidness of life
By Mharla Francesca Santiano
“What did I just watch?”
This was one of the first reactions my brain could process after watching this certain video on my For You Page (FYP). It was a dump of random videos with melancholic wordless audio. It was so random, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Though its content all seems to blur in my memory, I do remember one of the video’s tags: #corecore.
What exactly is corecore?
If you encounter a TikTok with random clips stitched and overlapped together, coming from all forms of media that you can think of — YouTube vlogs, news reports, televised interviews, films, etc., then you’re most likely watching corecore content. Creators and consumers of this content also refer to the genre as nichetok. These videos are usually accompanied by somber music with the goal to exude emotions from viewers.
If you feel strangely sucked in while watching a corecore video, and couldn’t help but watch all its juxtaposing details and wait for its end that you don’t even know what it will look like, then that is exactly the goal of a corecore video.
TikTok creator @tamarciment elaborated that the purpose of corecore was to “bring us out” of the loop — to halt our numb and senseless scrolling and consumption of the internet. It’s supposed to feel paralyzing so you can see it in its entirety — its differences and similarities, its intentional and accidental points. At the end of the video, it evokes an emotion that presses on your chest where you have no choice but to pause and process what you just watched.
What is it about?
From its name, corecore can literally be about anything. One of the first corecore TikToks I watched showed a short compilation of random videos from different forms of media. There was no underlying theme to it, just pure chaos. But what set the mood to even out the differences was the audio. It wasn’t an upbeat song, and it seemed to play the same notes over and over, mimicking how we blindly go through a routine we didn’t even set ourselves when we scroll through the internet. It became the checkpoints that cars need to stop for in video form, and I was the car. It felt like an avenue of self-awareness, of what I’m doing, what I have been doing, and what I plan to do next.
Some corecore edits equip a theme but they still incorporate the same visuals of disarray. There are corecore TikToks that deal with themes of mental health, technology, misogyny, and sometimes, even corecore itself. Most corecore videos help deliver feelings of hopelessness, discouragement, and even an unexplainable heaviness.
But there are creators who wander away from the accustomed gloom of corecore videos. With the familiarity of what makes a video a corecore content, they strive to summon sensations of hope, motivation, and even just plain warmth. These pieces of content can display women empowerment, kindness, and accomplishments in various fields. These videos also tag themselves as hopecore or positivecore; a corecore subgenre.
What about it?
There was actually a time when a corecore edit made me realize that it was finally time to tap out of the app. It was a video of a woman who was doing the exact same thing as I was — lying on the bed on her side, scrolling through TikTok. She stops at the video of a man saying “you’ve made no progress,” and that was when she also stopped scrolling.
And I did the same thing. Corecore has a way to pierce through a viewer of its content. And it has been nothing but effective in conveying a message through different viewpoints and media — all without a script. There’s this silent stress of a call to action without actually verbalizing it. Since corecore makes use of content from an array of sources, the genre can undoubtedly resonate with a bigger audience. The message then reaches more people, and presents a bigger space for the consumers’ conclusions.
One can consider corecore as a fad, like the many TikTok transitions and dances that come and go, but with the genre’s dependence on what’s happening, what happened, and what might happen in the world and its workings, corecore can actually be an aesthetic of content creation that’s here to stay.
No matter which corecore video you consume, there will always be that lingering feeling of being too self-aware. And this opens us to feel more intimately, to bring out the emotions you don’t always let yourself feel. Even though a corecore video bounces from ingrained social issues to life’s mundanities, there will always be a parallel in each of them: humanity.
The genre puts the uncomfortable into a confusing square of moving pictures which reminds us that sensations of being uncomfortable still exist. And it’s in our control to do something about it.
