“Come to Brazil” is a meme from the old internet. Not the real old internet but the internet that existed between the introduction of web 2.0 and Trump getting elected. When Twitter and Instagram existed but no one was that good at them yet. Before various influencers had time to rise and fall and just at the beginning of people getting TV writing gigs from Twitter.
Understanding this meme is simple. Brazil is a gigantic country that musical artists almost never visit. People there want to see their favorite artists and understand the power of suggestion. “Come to Brazil” is not a unique or particularly complex phrase. It is an earnest statement of desire. It does not take a genius to understand what Brazilians want. They want you to come to Brazil. It is a collective effort on the part of all Brazilians who put in the work in the youtube comments section. En masse they flock to the videos of the artists they love and comment their true hearts desire: “Come to Brazil”
It is the internet's version of Shen Yeun. An aspect of life that went unquestioned until people finally put together what was going on. The replies and comment section of any popular artist was flooded with “Come to Brazil”. A meme like this requires years and years of recognizing it as a fact of life before it becomes a meme. The jokes came long after it was embedded into the fabric of the internet. Tide goes in, tide goes out, Justin Bieber’s youtube comments are asking him to come to Brazil.
The joke then becomes you can ask anyone to come to Brazil. Any youtube video becomes flooded with comments from non Brazilians asking the subject to come to Brazil. Back in my day, before we were asking our female friends to step on us, a perfectly acceptable positive hyperbolic Instagram comment was “Come to brazil”. It was a high compliment. For those who still might not get it, in today's terms we would ask Peppa Pig and Emily Montes to Come to Brazil. It elevates the subject to the level of superstardom.
I have no personal attachment to Come to Brazil as meme but I do think what it says about the world is interesting. Very rarely are memes about real life in this way. To me, an American, the internet feels disconnected from location. Constantly, people are able to hid their exact placement in the world as long as they don’t reference anything specific. They will ultimately give themselves away, referencing Tim Hortons or In and Out, talking about local elections, spelling something with a u. So much of the internet is about relatability and the less you reveal about your specific location the more world wide appeal one has. Come to Brazil is obviously based on location and the specific needs of people in that location. No one ever comes to Brazil, and the people of Brazil want to change that using the internet. They love Adele, or Katy Perry, or really anyone popular and are trying to reach them any way they can. To us, it seems the entire country is logging on making their desires known not only to the artists but the entire English speaking world. It was a new understanding of culture both from the internet and based on it entirely. We now all knew a new fact about Brazilians that was not true for our parents or the generation before us. The British are buttoned up, Canadians are nice, and Brazilians are fanatical about musicians coming to their country.
You may be at this point asking, why Brazil? The simple answer is because it is big. It is three times the size of the next biggest country in South America, Argentina and has quadruple the population of Columbia, the next most populous. Four of the ten largest cities in South America are in Brazil. According the most recent census only 5% of the population speaks English, which seems small, but thats still 10 million people. It makes sense that the third largest country in the western hemisphere would want to participate in the world at large, especially on that scale.
Once you understand the geographical significance, it makes more sense but why the fanaticism? I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush but what is it about Brazilian culture that makes people such big fans? Most people my age who use the internet, if asked to name a facet of Brazilian culture, would probably say something about this meme and come to Brazil. But does this aspect of their culture exist outside of not only the internet, but the english speaking internet? Would Brazilian people describe themselves as particularly big fans in general? Could Come to Brazil be a new kind of cultural understanding? This is how these people from this country behave but only on the internet and only when they’re speaking english. Is this culturally ingrained in a way I can’t speak to or is this a new factor of globalization?
For years, Come to Brazil was inescapable. It was impossible to scroll Tumblr without seeing at least one come to Brazil joke, if not three. It never fully died, it just petered out. People of the new internet and those who are not online might not know it, which is odd considering it was once so pervasive. Its definitely more popular among gay people and the stan twitter community but for so long it felt as much a part of the internet as rage comics. It is weird that something so pervasive is now almost entirely gone. A phrase, fallen out of use when it had a stranglehold for years. The language of the internet is full of idioms and bizarre sentence structures referencing years old tweets but nothing comes close to the popularity of Come to Brazil. Nothing has replaced it but nothing specific happened to make it go away.
Maybe we all aged out and grew up. It is perhaps a meme for teenagers. So desperate to connect to the outside world and their only outlet is the internet. That behavior made sense when we were young and the only thing that kept some people going was their online fandom community. But the Brazilians haven’t stopped. They still want people to come to their country. There’s stil a demand to come to Brazil. Maybe we’ve just accepted it now. That it has gone from fact of the internet, to meme, to explained meme, back to fact again. It is no longer funny because it’s no longer novel. We’ve learned to speak the language of the internet and that phrase is as much a part of the lexicon as using google as a verb. No longer funny, just true.
My brazilian mother never heard of the meme until I told her about it