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Today it’s about memes, or as we older people like to say at the dinner table while the children with rosy faces drink their milk: picture jokes.
This open-source digital pop culture phenomenon has seen a noticeable increase in importance over the past two years. Not only because it was a matter of making fun of collective experiences such as lockdown, fear of viruses and suddenly wearing a mask, no, especially because a lot of the distraction that was canceled in real life had to shift to the internet during this time.
Online, however, the whole bad vibe swelled in the wake of Corona, so that memes gained another function as lightning conductors or safe spaces. Those who indulge in endless cascades of gags don’t have to deal with assholes in the meantime. As simple as that.
The “meme” format is just a container that can of course also be filled by assholes and misanthropes. However, jokes whose punch line is aimed at discrimination or occurs from top to bottom have already been quite a non-starter in analog times – the meme age will not change that. Memes are best, imho, the more whimsical they are, the more presupposed they reflect an (already special) thing.
Finally using the accumulated pop culture distinction again! All that acquired knowledge of comics, series and C-celebrities is worth a lot more gold if you are among the two or three percent who even get a certain nerd meme. And you said I was a disappointment, mother! Yes, but who has wasted their life when I forward you a gag and you don’t even know the template for it? Well, notice for yourself!
[Template, Mutti, ist die Blankoform eines Memes, die dazu genutzt wird, sie immer mit neuen Varianten zu versehen.]
Drake posting
A ramified topic like pop music is ideal for the so-called meme game. You can joke about the musical preferences of others or about the artists themselves. But there’s more: One of the most prominent templates of the past few years shows the rapper Drake in two pictures in an orange down jacket in front of a yellow background. Once in a wavering pose, once quite enthusiastically. Now you can assign a statement to either pose – and when you’ve found momentum, you’re sitting on a viral hit.
Despite its high age for network phenomena, drake posting is still very popular – but it has lost its appeal in 2022. Especially since there is always the danger that the savings bank or the post office will sweep up former web highlights like a kind of awkward broom wagon, you should always come up with something new. Drake will take it!
What is this 1 Life, Savings Bank?
The viral aspect of memes is a lure for agency dorks of all kinds. Still, the xenophobia trend of confusing brands and popular memes seems to have peaked. The damage caused by the malice when companies try to sell themselves as too “in a good mood” is probably too great. The savings bank already did it in the mid-1910s – and died on the cross in place of other uncool idiot pioneers. Since then (my impression) there has been more caution. A number of people have still not recovered from this advertising staged as a meme – and that’s a good thing:
Katy Perry
But even more perfidious approaches to the meme universe do not go unpunished. A prominent example of this is certainly Katy Perry. Meme lord, flâneur and bass player Christoph Deckert summed it up very well for the Musikexpress recently in the print edition:
“Katy Perry dared to go the other way in 2017 and sent a whole armada of (supposedly) popular memes onto the thin ice of the nerd zeitgeist in their video for ‘Swish Swish’. However, the templates used were long since declared dead by the community and came from the rather uncool ‘normie’ genre. In addition, this commercial type of cultural appropriation is hated in the memesphere like nothing else. So the spectator camp was divided into contemptuous knowledgeable and confused ignorant.” (Christoph Deckert)
Katy Perry – The Return
In the case of Katy Perry, however, one can also state a positive backlash. Because the fact that she received so much headwind, especially on Twitter, in the course of her meme appropriation with a promo background, in turn mobilized her followers. They actually made a pretty original meme out of their star – used pictures of them so often that others did too. And so, in the art form of memes, Katy Perry is downright honored more than most musicians. Okay, some things may also be critical of her, but the majority of the Katymemes paraphrase the excited adoration of the Californian. Katycats like to call themselves makers of such memes.
Never gonna give you up
One of the oldest entanglements of meme and music culture can be found in the character of Rick Astley. The origins of the trend date back to 2007. It’s more of a kind of prank: it’s about getting others on the Internet to click on a link under false assumptions – clickbait, in other words. So that the duped user comes out of a video by Rick Astley and suddenly shouts “Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down” from the speakers. If you fell for that and landed on the 1987 hit penned by Stock, Aitken, Waterman, you became “rick rolled”.
666
A page that combines the topic of memes and bands in a very nice and contemporary way can be found on Instagram under the biblical-inspired name Band Memes666. Here, fewer specific artists are being negotiated (read: fooled), many more the unprofitable lives of musicians themselves. All the dreams of the success of one’s own band offer a veritable fall height. In your mind you’re already playing grindcore hits in halls of thousands, but in reality you’re just petting with the new guitar pedal, which doesn’t even sound really great. Memes and music – a productive relationship that gives a lot back to us humans…
And now for something completely different:
“Sick Of It – The Fuck It List” (Podcast)
With all the colorful meme tatütata, I really want to point out a podcast, folks. In my previous episode of the Pop Week (The Biggest Pop Scandals 2021) I would have liked to do that, but then I thought, no, the mood just doesn’t fit. But let’s face it, this podcast will never fit into the flow of a pop column. After all, it’s about cancer, death, finiteness.
When “Sick Of It – Statements of a Dying Woman” was recommended to me, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give it to myself. Understandable I think. But now I’m very glad I made the decision to do it. I don’t think I’ve ever learned more from a podcast – and I’ve actually heard quite a few.
Well, “Sick Of It” is about the Cologne speaker Franziska Knost, who discusses the really important questions in life in seven episodes (with the artist and director Tamer Jandali) – against the background of her fatal cancer. With her, the premise of the conversations sounds like this: “Then this question keeps rolling up to me: What do you still want to experience in the time you have left? What’s on your personal bucket list? And I was like: What are you talking about? Now another parachute jump, Caribbean vacation, swingers club and then everything’s fine? It doesn’t work that way folks. There are many more things that we could radically eliminate from our mindset. So who cares about a bucket list – let’s do a fuck-it-list.”
In the podcast itself it is just as offensive as it sounds here. Franziska faces the very central constraints and internalized social (delusional) ideas that concern and drive us all: Finding great love, finding fulfillment in parenthood as well as in a career and so on.
The pressure that this puts on everyone is shown in this perspective from someone on whom it can no longer exert such power. Franziska resists, but never comes up with sensitive truths and pure teachings, doesn’t try to create consolation, but simply disarms all the demons – which ultimately brings something comforting with it.
For me personally, “Sick Of It” also brought a lot with regard to the question of how one can/should behave when someone in one’s own environment has to live with, let’s say, a “final diagnosis” – and what the hundred well-intentioned comments are under an illness posting à la “Kick cancer’s ass!” or “You are a fighter!” also trigger in those affected.
I don’t want to kid you: This podcast will break your heart – and not only when the overly likeable protagonist sheds tears herself. Nevertheless, he always has wit (even if it’s just gallows humor) and above all a large treasure trove of unsparing insights. Don’t miss.
What happened until now? Here is an overview of all pop column texts.
