Corecore

Corecore is a TikTok-born aesthetic and artistic movement characterized by rapidly edited montages of disparate digital content—film clips, news footage, social media snippets, and existential soundbites—often accompanied by melancholic or ambient music. The aesthetic serves as both emotional catharsis and cultural critique, addressing themes of hyper-consumerism, digital alienation, climate anxiety, and post-2020 societal disillusionment.

The term "corecore" initially appeared on Tumblr as early as April 2020, when user muttgirl began using the hashtag #corecore in posts, initially as part of the broader satirical response to the proliferation of "-core" aesthetic naming conventions (Know Your Meme, 2024). However, the aesthetic as it's understood today emerged on TikTok through early video creators who began experimenting with emotionally charged montage editing in 2020 and 2021.

Mason Noel (@masonoelle) is widely credited as creating one of the genre's foundational videos. On January 1, 2021, Noel posted a compilation featuring clips of melting Arctic sea ice, TikToker Charli D'Amelio, Black Friday shopping footage, and scenes from American Psycho, all set to somber violin music and tagged with #capitalism and #decay (Wikipedia, 2024). The 20-second video captured what would become the corecore ethos: using found footage to create "something that can't be categorized, commodified, made into clickbait, or moderated," as Noel later explained (Wikipedia, 2024).

Other pioneering creators included John Rising (@highenquiries), who created similar montages using clips ranging from British filmmaker Adam Curtis to internet personality Nikocado Avocado, and various other TikTokers who experimented with the format throughout early 2022 (Know Your Meme, 2024). However, these early videos existed without the specific "corecore" label.

The crucial moment came on July 16, 2022, when TikTok user @heksensabbat became the first to use the hashtag #corecore on the platform, posting a montage featuring scenes from Taxi Driver, Good Time, and Family Guy (Know Your Meme, 2024). This moment marked the transition from an unnamed video editing style to a recognized aesthetic movement with its own hashtag and community.

Corecore exploded in popularity throughout the summer and fall of 2022, with the hashtag accumulating hundreds of millions of views on TikTok. The aesthetic resonated particularly with Gen Z audiences who found in these chaotic montages a reflection of their own "technological disarray and ennui" (Wikipedia, 2024). Videos often featured what users called "deep-fried" memes—content that had been reposted and filtered so many times it became grainy and distorted—alongside more serious footage of climate disasters, political events, and social commentary.

The movement's growth sparked significant discourse about its artistic and political value. Critics and supporters debated whether corecore represented genuine anti-capitalist art or merely "gibberish shitposts," with some arguing that later iterations had lost the political edge of early creators like Mason Noel and John Rising (No Bells, 2024). Media outlets compared the aesthetic to Dadaism and video art, recognizing it as an "absurdist reaction to algorithmic chaos" that reflected "post-pandemic disillusionment and media overload" (Meme Reference current entry).

By February 2023, the hashtag #corecore had received over 664 million views on TikTok, and by March 2023, it had surpassed 2.1 billion views (Wikipedia, 2024). The aesthetic's influence extended beyond TikTok, inspiring academic discussion about digital art, youth culture, and contemporary methods of processing collective trauma through collaborative meme-making.