Haliey Welch, Our “Hawk Tuah” Girl of the Year
In the sweltering heat of a Nashville summer, a 21-year-old woman named Haliey Welch uttered two words that would change her life: "hawk tuah."
The phrase, delivered with a twangy Southern drawl as part of a crude joke about oral sex, ricocheted across social media platforms with the speed and force of an assassin’s bullet. Within days, Welch had become a bona fide internet celebrity, complete with millions of followers, lucrative sponsorship deals, and her own fawning profile in the same Rolling Stone magazine that once published Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.
Welch's rise to fame followed a familiar trajectory. A brief video clip, initially shared on Instagram by YouTubers Tim & Dee TV, spread like wildfire across multiple platforms. The internet, ever hungry for fresh content, latched onto Welch's folksy charm and unfiltered delivery of her expectoration-mimicking exhortation. Memes proliferated. Catchphrases were born. A star with considerable red-state appeal was minted.
But what, exactly, is Welch famous for? It's a question that becomes increasingly difficult to answer the more one examines her sudden celebrity.
In her Rolling Stone interview, conducted mere weeks after her viral moment, Welch struggles to articulate any concrete plans or ambitions beyond vague notions of "doing something that actually matters" and making a difference. Her publicist, meanwhile, speaks of supporting Welch's future in "comedy and philanthropy" — lofty goals for someone whose claim to fame rests entirely on a single, crude joke that could very well end up anchoring an entire reality show.
The vacuousness at the center of this particular celebrity narrative is striking, even by the standards of internet fame. At least figures like "Chewbacca Mom" or "Hide Yo Kids, Hide Yo Wife" guy Antoine Dodson had some semblance of a story or personality beyond their viral clips. Welch, by contrast, seems to have materialized out of thin air, a country-fried blank slate onto which the public has projected its desires and expectations.
This is not to say that Welch herself is without substance or personality. By all accounts, she seems to be a good-natured, horse-loving young woman thrust into a situation she never anticipated. But the machine of internet fame cares little for the nuances of individual personality. It hungers only for pure content, for moments that can be endlessly remixed, reposted, and monetized into infinite “timepassing” filler.
And monetized it has been. Reports suggest Welch has already raked in tens of thousands of dollars from merchandise sales and personal appearances. She's judged bikini contests, appeared onstage at concerts, and fielded countless interview requests. All this for a woman who, just weeks ago, was working in a factory that manufactures springs for vending machines.
By way of comparison, consider the case of the aforementioned Antoine Dodson, one of the preceding decade’s more memorable viral stars. His impassioned, colorful interview following an attempted break-in at his sister's apartment became the stuff of legend in 2010. The Gregory Brothers' Auto-Tuned remix, "Bed Intruder Song," climbed the Billboard charts and made Dodson something of a household name.
But fame, especially the internet variety, is a fickle mistress. Despite attempts to parlay his viral moment into a lasting career — including his own reality show pilot and various endorsement deals — Dodson's star faded almost as quickly as it had risen. By 2014, he had renounced his homosexuality and was participating in an uninspired celebrity boxing match against his sister's alleged attacker, a far cry from the heights of his fleeting fame.
Welch now finds herself in the unenviable position of trying to build a lasting career on the foundation of her own one-liner. Her team speaks of comedy and philanthropy, but these feel like grasping attempts to retrofit meaning onto perhaps the most fundamentally meaningless phenomenon of 2024. I mean, think about it: Is “hawk tuah” really comparable to the sustained effort and talent required to build a traditional career? Should we celebrate these fleeting internet sensations with the same fervor we reserve for artists, athletes, or innovators who have honed their crafts over years?
There's an argument to be made that figures like Welch represent a democratization of fame, wresting control from gatekeepers and allowing anyone with a smartphone and a moment of inspiration to achieve recognition. But this democratization comes at a cost. When anyone can become famous for anything, the very concept of fame loses its meaning and value.
Moreover, "hawk tuah" highlights the increasingly blurred lines between reality and performance in the age of social media. Welch's initial video feels spontaneous and unscripted, but every subsequent public appearance since has been carefully managed and curated. The authentic moment that catapulted her to fame has given way to a much more carefully constructed public persona ostensibly looking to do “philanthropy” and the like.
This blurring of authenticity and performance is not unique to Welch, of course. It's a hallmark of modern celebrity, where every tweet, Instagram post, and public appearance becomes potential fodder for brand building or brand cancellation once the persona behind it has attracted a bit of attention. But the speed with which Welch has been absorbed into this system is exceptional even by these standards. In no time at all, she's gone from unknown factory worker to stage-managed celebrity, complete with a publicity team and carefully vetted public statements about how her emergence might be the God’s way of directing her toward more positive projects.
The Rolling Stone profile of Welch took this already surreal situation and pushed it into the realm of the absurd. In a bewildering leap of logic, Joseph Hudak describes Welch as a "Gen Z Dolly Parton" who "exudes the charm and magnetism" of the country music legend. This comparison is as baffling as it is revealing.
It almost goes without saying that the venerable Dolly Parton built her career on songwriting and acting talent, a surprising amount of business acumen, lots of expensive plastic surgery, and decades of hard work. Welch, by contrast, is famous for an off-the-cuff joke about oral sex. Are the twentysomething “kids” of today perceived by Hudak and others as being so devoid of substance that their "Dolly Parton" is a woman whose only claim to fame is “doing the work” of uttering a vulgar quip?
The crude simplicity of Welch's joke merits further examination. "You gotta give 'em that 'hawk tuah' and spit on that thang!" is hardly the height of wit or insight. It's a base, juvenile comment that in any other context would likely elicit eye rolls rather than global attention — and a remark that has surely been uttered in a host of other online media, from pornography to prior TikTok videos, without any massive response.
“Hawk tuah”, then, constitutes both a culmination and a perversion of internet culture's evolution. In the halcyon days of the almost-old internet, memes like the Tubcat website existed in a kind of digital speakeasy — cherished by a few weirdos who had settled on the slowly-closing frontiers of this world wide web of lies, unknown to the normies who still resided offline. There was a certain purity to those earlier viral sensations, confined as they were to the internet's poorly curated rubbish heap.
We've come a long way from the Tubcat fan page's pink background and broken English charm (“TUBCAT IZ NOT MY KITTIE!!!! I AM ONLKY A FAN!!!”). That old internet frontier, once a refuge for the socially maladjusted and chronically bored, has been fenced in and forced to serve as the primary arena of pop-cultural discourse. And in this discursive brave new world, "hawk tuah" reigns supreme.
Were Tom Wolfe to write “The Girl of the Year,” 2024 edition, he’d surely situate it in the hawk tuah-verse — a far cry from the boho, Baby Jane Holzer-led art-scene socialites he examined decades earlier. Welch is not selling sophistication or even a polished presentation of self; she's hawk-tuahing a bit of toilet humor right into our gaping maws. And we're swallowing it in droves, each retweet and TikTok duet another nail in the coffin of nuanced discourse.
As we watch Welch's star rise — and inevitably fall, as more consequential events like the debility of Joe Biden and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump begin to dislodge her from the news cycle — we're not just observing the birth and death of another insubstantial internet celebrity. No, we're bearing witness to the continued erosion of what’s left of our shared community standards, the flattening of discourse into easily digestible, endlessly repeatable middle-of-the-road catchphrases. Welch is doing the work, we’re here for it for lack of anything better to do, and we still love to see it…at least until it’s time to direct our bored, glazed-over gaze at something else.
Indeed, the saga of "hawk tuah" is less about Haliey Welch herself and more about us — an online youth movement grown old, so starved for novelty and so eager to laugh itself to death that we'll elevate literally any poor sucker to the status of cultural icon.
So here's to you, Haliey Welch, Girl of the Year, Queen of the Hawk-Tuah Moment. May your reign be as brief as it is bewildering, a fleeting reminder of our collective descent into extremely online madness from which there can be no return. Here, you're both yesterday’s main attraction and tomorrow’s sideshow freak — a living, breathing embodiment of our insatiable appetite for the next big thing, bigger at least for a few minutes of fame than any of us could ever hope to become, no matter how penny-ante your run turns out to be in the final analysis.
And as for the rest of us? We'll keep doomscrolling, keep liking, keep sharing — always chasing another hit of dopamine hawk-tuahed right into our unblinking, bloodshot eyes. Deep down, we're all just wannabe Haliey Welches: poor performers strutting and fretting across the stage in the empty auditorium of our notifications, desperately spitting our pathetic content into the digital void — all the while secretly and incessantly praying that someone, anyone, will take our juicy loogie right in the kisser and pause to notice our meager virtual existence for even one half of a split freaking second. They won’t, but isn’t it pretty to think so?
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.
