TikTok goes a little overboard when it comes to categorizing every last aesthetic into its own microtrend. You notice it when Spotify Wrapped calls your music taste goblincore, or when you strangely end up at a charity gala in San Francisco and a tech exec asks you if he should be concerned that his teen daughter is obsessed with cottagecore (yes, this happened to me). Take any noun, add the suffix “core,” and you’re good to go.
There is no more natural terminus to this phenomenon than “corecore,” a meta aesthetic from “nichetok” that uses nihilistic video clips to create something so absurd and meaningless that somehow, it comes back around and makes you feel something. It leans into our impulse to mask all of our emotions in twelve layers of irony, but in the process, gets so earnest that it might not be ironic after all.
Take a look at arguably the most popular corecore video, which tallied up 2.2 million likes. It begins with a clip from a salary transparency account, in which people ask strangers what they do and how much money they make. A child says that when he grows up, he wants to be a doctor, and when the host asks him how much he wants to make, he says, “I’m gonna make… people feel okay.” Then, you’re immediately exposed to fast-cycling clips: a timelapse of a busy street; a guy screaming; elderly people playing slot machines in a casino; a TikToker talking about a chicken that lives in the metaverse; and people rushing out of a garage in crisis.
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