I Miss Musical.ly

Enough time has passed that I can finally be true to myself… I miss Musical.ly. When Musical.ly existed, we had hope. We didn’t have the impending doom of the world weighing down upon us, we just shook our phones and shook our asses to create a video worth being displayed on the top musers leaderboard. We dreamed of being up there with Loren Gray and Danielle Cohn, whose age we would never truly know. Being a part of this app was truly one of the most humbling experiences of my childhood. Especially because I started off on a tablet. I made Musical.ly videos. On a tablet. But time has passed, and how ridiculous I looked is between me, God, and my mom who consistently would enter my room at the worst moment.

TikTok is fun and all, but it will never compare to my one and only love. The app who made me the weird little freak I am today. Nothing can compare to terrible don’t judge a book by its cover trends or ridiculously sped up versions of Lost Boy by Ruth B. Now we are stuck with Italian brain rot characters and Subway Surfers over episodes of Shameless.

That’s not even the worst of it. Now it is mostly owned by American based companies, throwing us into the pits of ✨censorship✨. Political videos are being suppressed, content regarding abolishing ICE is suddenly removed in the blink of an eye, and overall the app no longer operates smoothly under extreme political control. Fuck you Oracle.

The app was already on a major decline as trends became stale and the cosplayers evaporated, but it is now as if we have hit a brick wall. In a time where it is so important to understand what is going on in the world, one of the biggest social apps in the country has removed our ability to see what is truly happening behind the screens. The truth is slowly becoming harder to find.

So no matter how humiliated I was shaking my phone or tablet around trying to nail that beat drop, I stand by the fact that Musical.ly was the superior app. Oh Vine this, Vine that, no. Musical.ly was my prime. It was our prime. We needed to be humbled early in life. It was important to our development. And what other app did Selena Gomez request to duet with you on? That’s what I thought. Fly high Musical.ly.