Meme Report 2/15
He say that I'm good enough, grabbing my duhduhduh
Rihanna Looking
Every year we try to make Superbowl memes and every year we do anywhere from just ok to pretty good. Listen, I love Rihanna. She’s one of the pop girls who came up at just the right time to soundtrack my life. Every middle school dance I ever went to played at least 6 Rihanna songs. She is ingrained into my personhood. This is no disrespect to her. The memes are lackluster.
If this were any other performer I would say that that is a bad sign. However, with Rihanna, it speaks to the quality of her performance. We were too busy singing along to our favorite songs (or trying to figure out if she was in fact pregnant) to really pick out parts where something funny happened. The meme is from the only part of the performance where music isn’t playing. We were waiting for her to begin and we created a meme out of a brief moment when we weren’t receiving content.
Red Boots
It’s New York Fashion Week (NYFW) and everyone is suddenly an amateur Anna Wintour. We all have something to say about fashion, whether we knew it before this week or not. Those too tired to look at a runway slideshow on Vogue or pretend to know who Phoebe Philo is, they’ve been satisfying their need to play Devil Wears Prada by making fun of the boots. The anime-inspired shoes are ridiculous and stupid and really only exist to be talked about online, and worn by celebrities. They are outrage bait. I hate that we fell for it, therefore I hate the memes. I never want to see the boots again.
Kim Kardashian Prarie Girl
It’s kind of amazing that Kim can do a themed shoot and then four years later it becomes a meme. I imagine the Kardashian historians go deep into their archives to find the perfect Kim image for each occasion or a rare one they would like to see in circulation. This one seems to be inspired by listening to Ethel Cain for the first time and had the perfect image to match the experience. Now the rest of us can use it for our various butter-churning-adjacent activities like going on a walk without our phones or picking up our takeout rather than having it delivered.
Honestly, the Kardashians should do more themed photoshoots with obvious categories. They’re already like living Barbie dolls, let's just give in to it. No more designers, Just Malibu Kim, Astronaut Kim, Kim runs for President. She does variations of this already, but let’s do it outright.
TikTok
Woman from 10,000 BCE
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This is the most popular trend on my For You page right now. I have complicated feelings about it. I somewhat enjoyed what it was in its first iteration. The original version compared and contrasted beauty rituals from the past with the modern world. I like when there’s a bit of a connection between the old world and the new. That we’re all still doing the same thing in theory but our methods and ingredients and names have changed. I enjoyed that sentiment and I learned new things.
But like all TikTok trends, it has been diluted over time. Now, It is just talking to our ancestors from the past, which is fine I guess but there’s not really a knowledge base there. It’s also reductive. What do we learn from yet another Irish girl saying she eats potatoes like her ancestors? That feels like the oldest stereotype you can say without being offensive, so if nothing else, it’s low-hanging fruit. Not everyone has something to contribute and that’s ok. We all want to feel connected to the past but some of us have insights to offer about how similar we are to our ancestors and others just have stereotypes.
With nothing to offer in the way of knowledge, this trend becomes schlocky and sappy. We lose the real evidence of a connection to humanity through history across cultures and instead trade on broad ideas not based on any real facts. We get cheap likes from pointing out that women are allowed to read now and they weren’t before. That’s sad but that’s not really the conversation we were having before. It’s not about how things changed, it’s about how they stay the same. The emotional response to this trend should be a light touch rather than fighting back tears because you made yourself think about the potato famine. We can make a different trend for that.
Since You Got Your Degree
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TikTok needs more sounds like this. It’s somewhat new and has many uses apparent from the get-go. We could do so much with this and have yet to discover exactly what. It’s short, it’s clear, and it introduces Gen Z to Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. I never thought a sound from that movie would go viral for a mild and cute trend but here we are.
Boys a liar Pt. 2
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In case you were hesitant about getting on the Ice Spice train, hesitate no more. TikTok is absolutely enamored with our girl and she just came out with the best verse of the year. She teamed up with our other internet favorite, PinkPantheress, to create a short perfect song. There’s not really an exact meme except talking about how much we all love the song, especially the Ice Spice addition. Sometimes the shared love of something is enough to launch it to meme status. It requires a burning passion and high quality. It doesn’t happen often but it’s happening now. Get on board.