Tate McRae

One Liner: YouTube star making pop after rising to fame from her dancing
Wikipedia Genre: Alt pop
Home: Calgary

Poster Position: 10
Both Weekends

Sunday at 2:30 on the Lady Bird Stage.

Thoughts: Holy hannah.  She's got a track with 727 million streams?  The current world of music exploration is super fascinating - like, if someone had a super-mega-hit like that when we were kids, then it would have been something that was widely known.  Meanwhile, I've never heard this song or even heard of this artist.  Those are some Drake numbers right there!

Huh.  Canadian.  And her initial rise to fame actually came from dancing?  That is weird - but she was the first Canadian finalist on So You Think You Can Dance.  Also, she seems to have turned that into a boatload of cash, because in 2020 she was the youngest musician featured on Forbes' 30 under 30 list.  But she is a legit dancer, like hardcore training from a very young age and ballet training at the School of Alberta Ballet.  She won Best Female Dancer at the 2013, 2015, and 2018 Dance Awards.  I don't know what that is, but it certainly sounds like she must be good.

She had a YouTube channel with a boatload of viewers, mainly to see her doing dance stuff.  But in 2017 she started adding in some singing stuff, showing her followers the process of writing and performing a new song or something.  One of those went viral ("One Day"), so she released it herself, and it went gold in Canada.  She signed with a label, and put out her first EP in 2020.  TikTok fueled the rise of "You Broke Me First," along with a performance at the VMAs.  That is her mega hit with 727.8 million streams.

Meh?  How is she not doing a badass dance in the video?  Seems like a missed opportunity.  The song is just fine, but I have no clue why it would be so massively popular.  Just sounds like many of the other pop tunes that are out there right now - like, if you told me that was an Ariana Grande track that she performed when her vocal range was limited for a minute, I totally would have gone along with it. Weird.

"rubberband" is pretty much a rap song.  I'm not entirely sure what style of music she's going for at any given time.  But that song made me look up from my work and take notice.  Catchy and groovy.  "wish i loved you in the 90s" makes me sad for how old I am.  Here's that video of her writing a song - "One Day" is her second-most streamed tune at 166 million streams, and this video has flipping 37 million views.

She one million percent is a teenager making a YouTube video.  This is the kind of stuff I hear from the other room as my kids waste hours watching videos on YouTube.  At the same time, holy shit man.  She fires this out like its nothing, and now she's been streamed millions of times.

All I know is that if she doesn't do a legit dancing show during her set, then she's disappointing.  Also, I won't be going over there to see her, as White Reaper might be one of the things I'm most excited about for this whole dang weekend.