Tuesday, February 12, 2019

"May-Mays"

I’ve been listening to a lot of what people would call “meme music” lately. Stuff like Never Gonna Give You Up (yes that link leads exactly where you think it leads), or What’s Up? or songs similar, if that makes sense. Stuff that, for some reason, the internet has latched onto as “the paragon of funny things.” Gangnam Style is another one.

I don’t know why specifically I’ve been listening to these songs, nor do I have the best reason for why these songs became popular in the first place. The closest I can come up with is that they’re all kind of unaware of their own charm? Like that paradoxical One Direction lyric, they don’t know how charming they are.

That sort of thinking, of course, extends to other mediums as well. Tommy Wiseau, for example, managed to make The Room, but everything else he’s made has been with that paratext in mind. “From the guy that made that disaster-of-a-movie The Room” all the promotional material seems to say. This can also be exemplified in music. People don’t remember Saturday at all, even if it’s technically a better song (or so I’m told. I’m not a music critic). Did you know that Rick Astley’s still making music?

But turning to more strict definitions of the word “meme,” I’ve also been listening to what people would call “memetic genres.” Entire types of music that get relegated to the “it’s just memes” category of listening. And to be fair, some of that derision is probably well deserved. The premier Vaporwave song is called “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” (Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing), for example, and other songs in the genre only get more esoteric. And I like to think Eurobeat (that’s “Techno Bluegrass” for those that remember that) would be a lot better received if it didn’t have Running in the 90s as its headlining song.

But both of those genres have a sort of cheesiness to them as well. Vaporwave’s major aesthetic is in reimagining 80s pop songs, and Eurobeat lyrics are frequently so obsessed with sex and cars and sex in cars that anything else is just an outlier.

So is “cheesy charm” what makes a song a meme? I mean, maybe. There are definitely outliers out there, of course. For example, Hurt as performed by Johnny Cash is not particularly cheesy at all (okay, maybe the shot of Cash pouring wine over everything is kind of funny). But it’s definitely a common factor for a lot of songs.

-F

No comments:

Post a Comment