Twitter (I’ll call it X when I’m dead in the ground)
I’m done talking about Barbie and Oppenheimer. I don’t care anymore. I saw both movies. The memes are fine. I think the Oppenheimer people are having more fun now and the Barbie people are at each other's throats a little bit. Whatever happens next is the result of talking something to death without the capacity for nuanced thought. Godspeed.
Mr. Chedda
I love Mr. Chedda. I love something that is born from a Google image search and a dream. I don’t know where the original image of Mr. Chedda came from but it doesn’t matter. Mr. Chedda is now a part of our canon. His lore and characterization is whatever we make of him and what we agree to carry forward. He is not a reference to anything nor a creation by someone else. He is the power of the collective. Right now we all agree he is some kind of benevolent boss in the restaurant industry. There’s nowhere to go but up with Mr. Chedda, I hope we get to meet his wife, or nemesis, or other employees of his. I’m very interested in the new MCU (Mr. Chedda Universe. )
Every European club song
Everyone really likes this. I don’t. I see what you see. I understand why you all think this is a really good parody and really fun song. It’s fine. For me, it does not match or meet the level of real Eurodance. There’s something missing. I am missing a genuine love and understanding of silly European club music. On Twitter, Michael Oswell broke down what it gets wrong on a literal level but that’s not where my gripes come from (It is a little bit as I’m learning I actually have a deep love and wealth of knowledge that I didn’t realize I had before). My problem with the song is that it is fine at both attempts of what it is trying to do but misses the mark overall. Obviously it’s trying to be funny but it's also trying to be a good song. I think it could be better as both parody and song. It’s not a really funny song that happens to be good or a really good song that happens to be funny. I think everyone on twitter is programmed to “hate” these things on principal but when one of them is simply passable people freak out. The bar has gotten lower with mass exposure. I think this is just recognition disguised as love. This song achieves what it sets out to achieve without going above and beyond. It’s a B-/C+, which is a passing grade if you’re used to failing. People like this song because there hasn’t been a good song parody in a while and after years on the internet our bodies have learned to crave them. A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.
You know [X] was scared
The Ariana Grande cheating scandal finally produced a meme that wasn’t people analyzing Ethan Slater’s looks. It was only a matter of time as Ariana Grande is the internet’s most studied celebrity. Ariana Grande isn’t really anyone's favorite or a stand out for her talent but we do love to talk about her. The summer of 2018 forever scarred us and now we all have an opinion on the girl with the ponytail. The meme itself is fun and extends the conversation about our favorite discussion topic, if not our favorite person.
Salt Air
August 1st is Salt Air day to commemorate the song August by Taylor Swift. It’s similar to Hot Summer Nights, Mid July of a couple weeks ago. We’re just marking time. It’s fun, it’s cute, and it’s over at the end of the day.
TikTok
It’s the first week of august which means there’s no good content on TikTok. It’s finally time to enjoy our summer before it’s over and that means no more trends. This is the best I could do.
Attenzione PickPocket
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Well, bad news everyone. The middle aged white woman who screamed at teenagers on the street is a fascist. I think we over estimate the power of the attention economy. Attention often does translate into money and power, especially for random people on the internet but it doesn’t have to, and to act like that is a guarantee only ends in disappointment. Our attention spans are short and the Attenzione pickpocket lady would have fallen out of our attention soon without the New York Times piece. Her power translated at most to tweets and private texts, perhaps someone selling a shirt that she would never see a cut of. Now there’s an article about her that conveniently omits her political motivations behind the videos. This is so much more complicated than it ever needed to be. Legacy media reporting on memes often misunderstands why we care and what we care about when it comes to memes. 9 times out of 10, we never want to know more about the person who created something we find funny.
Quiet Luxury
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Emily Mariko got married last weekend and now everyone is talking about quiet luxury. Quiet Luxury is just the opposite of tacky. It’s tacky to talk about how much money you have and say how much things cost. It’s a negative trait no matter what tax bracket you’re in. Quiet Luxury is just rewarding rich people for not participating in that specific tacky behavior. The problem is people are really bad at identifying how much things cost and what expensive things cost. Remember when everyone was shocked to find out Tinx was rich? Emily Mariko’s wedding was not “quiet luxury” if you know how much even one thing at the wedding costs, which most of them you can tell by looking! Rich People aren’t being coy or demure when they don’t drop the price tag on their expensive items, they’re being normal. The onus is not on them to tell us how much their things cost but any savvy person who comments on wealth, class, or finance on the internet should probably figure out how to recognize expensive things just by looking at them.
I Love The Way It Feels To Be A Hater
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This is my song of the summer. It’s on the rise and I can’t wait for it to be on spotify. I simply love the way it feels to be a hater.
An interesting week for memes. Mr. Chedda is a mass market hit, I love him.
The Eurodance parody may start to show the age difference in memers. This one seems mostly for the millennials who heard this music in the 90s and early 2000s. All but the oldest of Gen Z might care for this. The rest will return to listening to breakcore remixes of playboi carti songs.