What Is ‘Modelland’? Why TikTok Is Suddenly Obsessed With Tyra Banks’ Bizarre YA Novel

In the best way, scrolling through TikTok can become a kind of fever dream. Accidentally engage with a single video (or, in my experience, be too busy to scroll on the platform for a day or two) and your For You Page can begin to make wild assumptions, serving you something that you couldn’t have even imagined.

For the past few weeks, a growing number of people have had that experience with one extremely specific piece of art: Modelland. The brainchild of America’s Next Top Model host Tyra Banks, Modelland began with a young-adult dystopian novel of the same name, which was released in the fall of 2011 amid pop culture’s obsession with franchises like Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games.

Ghostwritten by screenwriter Michael Salort, Modelland introduces readers to Tookie De La Crème, a “gawky” girl with one “ominous green eye” who is regarded to be a “Forgetta-Girl” in the social hierarchy of her high school. She lays down on the floor of her high school in silent protest, eating whipped cream straight from the can and being ignored by practically everyone around her. This life is disrupted when Tookie is kidnapped and forced to attend Modelland, a mountaintop Hogwarts-esque boarding school hoping to create the next generation of supermodels (known as “Intoxibellas”). In the words of the book’s official synopsis, Tookie then befriends “a plus-sized girl named Dylan, a 4-foot-7-inch girl named Shiraz, and an albino girl named Piper,” and the quartet join forces to figure out why they were brought to Modelland… and why a “mysterious imposter” wants to get rid of them.

There’s already a lot to unpack in that logline, especially given the fact that the finished product of Modelland is a whopping 576 pages long. That’s longer than any Hunger Games installment, nearly as long as East of Eden, and comparable to some editions of Dune and The Iliad. (Banks claimed in a 2012 blog post that she wrote “thousands of pages” for the story.) But the world of Modelland, which Banks herself referred to as reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, only gets wilder once you go down the proverbial rabbit hole. Every new detail boggles the mind: every Modelland student is synced to the same menstrual cycle, disobedient Intoxibellas are transformed into cats, the entire place smells like blood oranges, and Tookie’s father died in a gloriously specific way. (I came across a TikTok on that subject the other day and it genuinely made me disassociate.)

Let’s Talk About the Theme Song…

But Modelland exists far beyond the pages of the 2011 novel: there was, of course, a tie-in challenge on that year’s cycle of America’s Next Top Model. Banks attempted to revive the concept as a theme park in Santa Monica in 2019, which faced years of delays and an eventual closure amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Fans have also, retroactively, realized that the packaging for Banks’ “hot ice cream” restaurant SMiZE & DREAM features Tookie’s trademark green eye.

And then there’s the “homemade” theme song for Modelland, which was uploaded by Banks to YouTube in October of 2011. To an extent, there are no words I can write which will adequately prepare you for the sonic experience of listening to “Tyra Banks’ Homemade Modelland Song”. All 83 seconds of it defy all conventions, with lyrics from Bank’s own point of view about being chased by “four chicks in green / running the New York streets” who “are running for their life” because “their beauty is in strife.” The chorus then frantically asks, over a hyperpop beat, “Can you, can you, can you survive Modelland?”

The theme song is, actually, partially responsible for Modelland‘s recent resurgence. On June 7th, a viral tweet from @sourkrowt shared the song in its entirety, arguing “i’m being so serious i think she officially made the worst song of all time.” Baffled, but beautifully-worded reactions to the song followed across social media, with my personal favorites including that it’s “like six panic attacks at once,” “like a triangle,” music from the future, and the result of Banks only having two minutes before her computer battery was going to die.

Why Is Modelland All Over TikTok?

The Modelland song then led people to dive into the book and its weird web of lore, and it hasn’t slowed down from there. Given the fifteen-year gap since the book was first published, the actual manuscript has become a sort of sacred text, with people either rushing to place a hold for it at their nearest local library, find a secondhand copy (fun fact: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen seemingly donated their copies to a local thrift store), or at very least listen to other people recap it on TikTok. All the while, Banks herself has been found in the comments on virtually every TikTok on the subject, either making encouraging jokes or teasing to “stay tuned” for something new from the franchise.

At the start of this article, I referred to Modelland as “art”… and I don’t think that is entirely unjustified. Part of why the book, the song, and the attempt at a multimedia franchise have gone viral are because people are charmed by how weirdly human it all is. Every detail about the book is so bizarre and specific, in a way that our current world of generative AI slop couldn’t possibly create or recreate. Same with the panic-inducing, off-beat production of Banks’ theme song, which truly just sounds like she had a minimal understanding of GarageBand and a dream.

Everything about Modelland is nonsensical, in a way that circles back around to feeling authentically human, while also just being campy as hell. I’m not the first or last person to argue this, but it deserves an adaptation on some sort of streaming service… or, at very least, a new printing of the book.

(featured image: Netflix)

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