“Can we play ‘Be Like a Woman’ in this beeyotch?”
At a studio in Manhattan’s NoMad neighborhood, the speakers fill the room with an avant-pop track from 1979 — one that failed to find an audience upon its release, but leaped onto the Billboard Hot 100 this year after being discovered by teens on TikTok. Minutes ago, a group of stylists, publicists and journalists were bustling around with an all-business attitude; it’s a Friday morning in late June, so we all want to get our work done to head into the weekend. But there was a marked vibe shift when a certain 19-year-old stepped out of the elevator.
David Roemer for Variety
“That fit is so fire.” “What a fire setup.” “Are we about to hang out and do a video together? Fire,” he says. Everyone is giggling about his vocabulary, but they’re still charmed. Besides, he’s in on the joke: The older the person he’s speaking to, the more he plays up his youth. In 90 minutes with me — I’m 26, too old to be his peer, but young enough to get his references — he uses the word “fire” a mere three times. But while chatting with the 30- and 40-something photographers and creative directors on set, something new is “fire” every 30 seconds.
Outside of his entourage, most of the people here hadn’t ever heard the name “Malachi Barton” before prepping for this shoot. That’s OK — he’s doing just fine with his target audience: the TikTok generation. He has more than 7 million followers on that platform, plus 3 million on Instagram. (He doesn’t post on X anymore. None of the kids do.) And his popularity will only grow with the Aug. 13 debut of “Camp Rock 3,” in which Barton plays the male lead in the relaunch of the Disney Channel franchise that sent both Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers’ careers into the stratosphere nearly two decades ago.
