Meme Report 6/21
Oh They're Milking Grimace? Should We throw a party? Should we invite Grimace?
Grimace’s Birthday
We’ve reached peak Grimace. Our culture has long been fascinated by the mostly discontinued remnants of the McDonalds Extended universe. They exist as a memory. People my age know from The Hamburglar and Mayor McCheese but mostly from our elder Millennial and Gen X internet guides. What we have is passed down mostly through referential and oral tradition. The posters may have remained in our childhood McDonalds but were quickly erased when they all got renovated in the 2000s. The enduring character for all of us was, and is, Grimace. He’s easy to understand in that he’s impossible to understand. What is he? What does he do? What’s his raison d’etre? Where does he come from? Where is he going? None of this information is immediately apparent so the only choice we’re given is to take him as he is. No questions asked.
This meme is entirely designed and created by McDonalds, America's favorite company. While normally there is some pushback to entirely corporate funded memes, the internet is pro Mcdonalds. Post Supersize me, Americans can’t deny for their love of McDonalds. Morgan Spurlock is a fraud and there’s nothing better for a hangover than a Mcdonald's hash brown. The disheveled messes of the internet aren’t going to pretend they're too good for McDonalds, and so we have no choice left but to embrace them.
If things were different and they hadn’t taped into the Grimace ethos so well, we’d be having a different conversation. Often the best Grimace Content is stuff from the McDonald’s archives. After all, they created him. Combine a love of grimace with a love of Mcdonalds, we don’t really have a leg to stand as far as an anti-capitalist meme critique of the Grimace celebration. Honestly, good for McDonalds for doing this now. Most companies are reactive to memes or attempt to create new ones. The Grimace celebration feels almost collaborative. (Almost because for now, The Grimace Wiki has been overwritten for promotion, undoing the hard work of Grimace’s #1 fan) It’s not a response to a recent uptick in Grimace content, but a continuation of ongoing Grimace grumblings. Grimace isn’t over, he’s just beginning.
That being said, we’ll need to take a Grimace break after this. I am tired of the jokes about milking Grimace. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Grimace is much more than some hack disgusting joke that gets made any time a food item is named after a creature. We need some actual creativity when approaching him. We’ve been given so much. Let’s use it to the best of our abilities.
🐬Ocean Corner🐬
Orcas
Nature is fighting back. It’s done healing and it’s out for blood. The Orcas are sinking boats and many think it’s because they’re out for revenge. We can all agree this is a good thing., but it’s getting a little too Reddit for me. Anytime science news trends we’re always a couple days away from learning more than we would ever want to know. We all think it’s funny now but the last thing I want to do is seriously engage in a conversation about this. I want to laugh at a meme and move on. I don’t want to talk to my co-workers about it. I don’t want to read an article. I certainly don’t want to watch a video. This is not of interest to me beyond the headline. I saw one good meme now, leave me alone. Go Orcas but that’s it.
The Submarine
This one isn’t really a meme but a slow reveal of facts that are more horrifying than the last. It’s a thousand people doing research all at once, and it seems like each person finds a new horrible fact every five minutes. It’s the Vince McMahon meme to the nth panel. I can’t learn any more facts about the submarine or else I will have to go lie down for an hour. My last straw was the picture of Macklemore on the website.
🌊🌊🌊
Perfume Girlies
A forgotten philosopher (Twitter person who I don’t remember) noted a while ago that astrology studies were being replaced by perfume studies. We all learned our sun moon and rising and now the time has come to figure out the difference between top and bottom notes. It has permeated culture so much that boys are posting about it. Single men have taken notice of what the girlies are posting online and what it says about their personality. They’re warning the others that there’s a new type of subculture. The same way they posted warning each other about girls asking about birth times. It’s yet to reach peak culture and is still only popular among the very online. For now, it is just an anthropological note: the very online boys have noticed that the very online girls have a new hobby. More on this story as it develops
We Can’t We Don’t Know How To Do It
We’re making fun of the retvrn people, again. This one is the least compelling to me. I don’t see it entering into our ironic vocabulary the same way “we used to be a country” did or any of their other stupid phrases that all amount to it was better in the past. It’s too construction focused and while we’re all amateur urbanists, I think this won’t get a lot of play. I will be honest the first time I saw this, it was a meme version about a mall food court and I believed that we really couldn’t recreate a mall food court with modern-day technologies. So maybe my ego is a bit bruised on this one.
TikTok
TikTok Song of the summer - Makeba by Jain
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The song of the summer is my favorite cultural phenomenon, and while most of the time we can’t determine what it is until mid-August, on TikTok an overwhelming sonic repetition is easier to notice. It starts with a couple well-edited videos that create a certain vibe, ones about travel and graduation and having a good time. Then it spreads to creators trying to mimic that vibe, then it becomes popular on its own, as we all begin to genuinely enjoy the song. Then it’s everywhere. Any thought that one could think to have will now be soundtracked by that song.
This year its Makeba by Jain. An ethereal song by a French singer about South African musician Miriam Makeba. The song has repetitive lyrics and a fun vibe. Last year the same was true of Steve Lacy’s Bad Habit. While Bad Habit soundtracked a slow lazy summer vibe, Makeba is the sound of upbeat excitement, all the prospects of early to mid-June. Later on, we might settle into a more languid, dreamier, sound as the haze of late July and August sets in. For now, days by the water and idyllic trips to Europe are met with the mounting drums of Makeba. It is slowly becoming ubiquitous and every kind of video from this time period (late May 2023 to present) can be set to this song. We’ve yet to find a strong contender for contemporary song of the summer so for now this one from 2015 will have to do.
Bill Hader Dancing Sticker
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The video of Bill Hader dancing in almost doll-like fashion has been well used in fan edits and memes, despite being from a cut for time sketch that almost no one remembers. No SNL sketch has had a longer life and been seen by less people. It reminds of the those k-pop idol reaction farming videos. It almost exists just to be put in various edits. This most recent form is as a sticker to represent 24 year old teenage girls just goofing around. It’s cute, it’s fun, it’s nothing special. Excited to where this clip of Bill Hader goes next.
Pine Grove Shuffle
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Most of the time, I find trends on my own. I spend hours scrolling through TikTok and Twitter and let the internet wash over me. While I love to read my colleagues in internet reporting, I am very rarely tipped off to a trend by them. This trend did not come across my FYP and I was instead tipped off by Molly O’Brien and her piece about modern music virality. We all need a little help some time.
To me, this trend is a classic example of a For Boys™ TikTok trend. Patriarchy often prevents boys from having fun like girls, certainly one of its most egregious offenses. This doesn’t stop them though. Often a confident funny boy will post himself dancing, usually semi-ironically but mostly sincere, and others will copy him, with the freedom of knowing it wasn’t their idea. Of course, girls will do it too, but that doesn’t make it not something from the For Boys genre. Though they may not feel it individually, girls have many more options to choose from if they want to make a TikTok expressing Joy and melancholy all at once. Straight Boys really only have this. They have one trend at a time to express themselves as a collective. In the words of a former president, Sad!
Hate McDonald’s, hate Grimace. No interest for me there. And the whole submarine thing has made me nothing but horrified at how people talk about tragedy on the internet. A dark week for me, personally, but a great excavation in this Substack as always