Tate McRae: How a Calgary Teen Became the UN Secretary-General of Sad Bops
Tate McRae and the Algorithmic Ballet of Global Stardom
By Matteo “Grim Reaper” Ricci, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau
If you’ve spent any recent evening doom-scrolling on a malfunctioning airport Wi-Fi in Jakarta—or, frankly, anywhere from Lagos to Lille—you’ve probably seen her: a 5’8″ Canadian in split-sole sneakers, executing a pirouette sharp enough to slice through whatever remains of the global attention span. Tate McRae is not merely a pop star; she is the newest export in humanity’s longest-running trade route: exporting teenage angst, repackaged as 15-second vertical videos, to anyone with a screen and a serotonin deficit.
Born in Calgary but algorithmically incubated on YouTube and TikTok, McRae represents a borderless, passport-less state whose primary natural resource is relatability. Her 2020 single “you broke me first” became the sonic equivalent of a UN emergency resolution: suddenly broadcast in 30 languages, lip-synced by Korean schoolgirls, Brazilian favela dancers, and German techno DJs who should honestly know better. The song’s underlying message—you hurt me, now watch me monetize it—turned heartbreak into a non-fungible currency. In a year when real economies shrank 3.5 percent, McRae’s brand of distilled sorrow grew at precisely the rate of collective loneliness. Coincidence? Ask the IMF.
Europeans, historically smug about North American cultural imperialism, have responded with their usual cocktail of envy and surrender. French ministers denounce TikTok’s data harvesting while their own kids choreograph McRae’s moves beneath the Eiffel Tower. In the U.K., Brexit negotiators spent three years failing to define “sovereignty,” yet every pub from Aberdeen to Plymouth can recite the pre-chorus to “greedy” without an accent. Meanwhile, Japan has folded her choreography into the national high-school dance curriculum, because nothing says kawaii like synchronized despair.
The Global South watches with a mixture of awe and déjà vu. Lagos club DJs splice McRae’s vocals over Afrobeats, creating a Franken-genre that sounds like heartbreak wearing ankara. In India, Bollywood marketing executives schedule emergency Zooms titled “How Do We Reverse-Engineer This White Girl’s Pain?”—a sentence that would have been dystopian in 1995 but now passes for Tuesday. And across the Middle East, McRae’s muted color palette is being studied by government censors as a potential model for “acceptable melancholy,” the kind you can broadcast without triggering a morality fine.
Of course, every empire has its supply-chain issues. McRae’s handlers must negotiate the delicate geopolitics of playlist placement: too high on Spotify’s Global 200 and Russia accuses the West of psychological warfare; too low and South Korea’s HYBE buys the master tapes just to see what happens. The carbon footprint of her last world tour—45,000 miles of private-jet crisscrossing—was quietly offset by purchasing “emotional credits”: essentially paying Brazilian influencers to cry on camera, thereby restoring karmic balance. Greta Thunberg called the maneuver “creative,” which in Scandinavian translates to “please stop.”
Yet the cruelest irony is that McRae’s music, ostensibly about vulnerability, is delivered via the most ruthlessly optimized distribution system ever devised. Each minor key triggers dopamine thresholds calibrated by Stanford dropouts; every tear-streaked thumbnail is A/B tested against 47 variants on a server farm in Estonia. We are, in effect, watching a human mood ring programmed by venture capital. If that sounds bleak, remember we collectively chose this over climate legislation.
Still, one must admire the efficiency. In an era when entire parliaments cannot agree on lunch, McRae has achieved what the United Nations only dreams of: a consensus that sadness is profitable. Her upcoming sophomore album, rumored to be titled “i’m sorry, are you?” will reportedly drop simultaneously in 176 territories, including—thanks to a loophole in international copyright law—North Korea. Pyongyang’s state media promises a “revolutionary ballet remix,” because even totalitarianism enjoys a catchy chorus.
As dawn breaks over yet another continent lip-syncing its collective heart out, the takeaway is both obvious and unsettling: in a fractured world, the only thing we still share is the algorithmic certainty that someone, somewhere, is dancing alone to the same three-minute confession. Tate McRae didn’t invent that loneliness—she just set it to a click track and shipped it priority mail. And we, the sleepless citizens of Planet Wi-Fi, signed for the package like our lives depended on it. Which, if you look at the engagement metrics, they apparently do.
