Oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no. This phrase doesn’t make sense out of context, but I found out that if you type it into Google, the search engine will understand. These are lyrics from a segment of “Oh No” by Capone, a song that the app TikTok has popularized. On TikTok, users create short videos with dances, text, and advanced filters, all set to audio clips. The soundtracks get stuck in people’s heads and become associated with punchlines or choreography. As videos reach millions of eyes, both in their native app and reposted on other social media platforms, the musical artists who created them can get big.
The summer after his freshman year at the University of West Georgia, Montero Lamar Hill was toying with prospects of studying computer science or becoming a surgeon. Hill had planned to spend the break studying, “but [he] got bored one day and made this song,” he later recounted. Posting funny memes from his sister’s place in Atlanta, Hill was able to diligently rack up thousands of Twitter followers. But every time he offered his audience a Soundcloud link to his original music, no one paid attention. Nonetheless, by the time fall rolled around, a new dream had formed for Hill, better known as Lil Nas X, the artist behind the country-meets-rap hit “Old Town Road.”
Virality and meme-inspired thinking were integral into Nas’s plan for “Old Town Road,” the first song he “genuinely formulated.” He explained to Rolling Stone, “I gotta make it short, I gotta make it catchy, I gotta have quotable lines that people want to use as captions. Especially with the ‘horses in the back’ line… This is something people are gonna say every day.” In December, Nas dropped the song on Twitter, set to a video of a dancing cowboy. His friends and followers posted short videos with the song, often including horses and cowboys, and Nas retweeted them regularly and strategically.
Over on TikTok, Michael Pelchat @nicemichael, a smiley, lanky 21-year-old from my hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, with a penchant for discovering and popularizing up-and-coming hip hop artists, finally came across his excuse to dress up as a cowboy. He messaged Nas on Instagram, who had three thousand followers at the time, for permission to upload the song to TikTok to be used in a video. Within months, several million TikTok videos used “Old Town Road.” Streams went up, the song ascended Billboard’s Hot Country chart (an easier climb than the R&B/Hip Hop list), and “managers, A&R reps, [and] concert bookers” caught wind.
Nas’s mantra: With enough shares and retweets, anything is possible. Appropriately, it was a tweet (“twitter please help me get billy ray cyrus on this”) that got Billy Ray Cyrus, well-known across generations for his country music and for his daughter Miley’s career, to agree to collaborate with Nas on a remix. The remix was released around the time that Billboard disqualified the song from its country music chart. The surrounding controversy only further popularized the hit. In April 2019, the original version snagged the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 and held it for nineteen weeks in a row. The remix achieved the highest single-week streaming figure in the country.
When you draw lessons and tactics from the culture of Internet memes and apply them to music creation and distribution, you get the phenomenon of “Old Town Road” — the synthesis of genres, the grassroots promotion and overnight blow-up inextricably intertwined with TikTok, Twitter, and other platforms’ audiovisual affordances. The artist and song bend and break genres in a self-aware way, to produce something that fills rappers, cowboys, and everyone in between with intrigue, and which is the perfect backing track for a funny, short, viral video.
Internet memes are pieces of content that spread rapidly around the web in different iterations and become shared cultural experiences. Memes predate the Internet, as does the contentious terminology “meme.” Geneticist Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976 to describe “melodies, catch-phrases, clothing fashion, architectural styles,” and ways of doing things. Audio memes include everyday soundbites, as well as the developed fields of foley and sound effects. The canonical yet inaccurate, often artificial sounds for a bald eagle cry, crack of a whip, and gunshot; glass shattering and a cat meowing; audience gasps and Wilhelm scream — generously portioned in the post-production process of many TV shows and films.
Memes are frequently visual, but many are audiovisual. Like memes, sound inherently has the power to evoke memories and convey expressions of culture. Sound bites such as ringtones pepper our everyday audio milieu. A ringtone is a performance: “a sign projected by the callee and interpreted by an audience.” Music’s immense performative power contributes to the mnemonic function of the ringtone: “This seemingly minute medium inevitably stirs strong memories to which new contexts make additions rather than radical alterations.” Or, you hear an email notification sound, and not only do you immediately know identify it, but it also conjures a host of concepts and memories you associate with the platform.
Though not new, memes have particularly flourished in our digital world, with interesting impacts. Internet memes interact with the platforms they exist in. Musicologist Paula Harper characterizes a subgenre of videos tagged or captioned with “unmute this” and explores how these videos flip our assumptions of which senses are engaged. Normally, vision is something we can turn on and off by closing our eyes or looking away, whereas hearing is considered always-on. This subgenre assumes and makes explicit a “flipped set of circumstances, an ecosystem in which vision is always being passively engaged, but hearing is discretionary and must be actively singled out and switched on.”
There are Reddit communities that construct and operate sophisticated meme economies — a fake stock market for buying, selling, and investing in what are called meme templates, which others use to create their own versions of a meme. These communities specifically hold the view that rarer memes that “normies,” or everyone else, have yet to see are superior, but in general, templates are central to all memes and serve as a substrate from which people can interpret and continue circulating a meme. For visual memes, this is usually a photo with empty spots to place text, or the original photo if it has a caption to override. For TikTok-esque multimedia memes, the template is the background audio — and all the meaning it bears and suggests.
TikTok formalized making music funny. Musical.ly, a Chinese app that was popular in the United States and got acquired by TikTok, primarily consisted of lip-syncing. But interaction with audio has evolved to be more than that. “Certain musical elements serve as TikTok catnip: bass-heavy transitions that can be used as punch lines; rap songs that… include a narrative-friendly call and response,” writes Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker. Australian music producer Adam Friedman of the Cookie Cutters explained to Tolentino that he was focusing on lyrics “you can act out with your hands… ‘How many hand movements can I fit into fifteen seconds? You know, goodbye, call me back, peace out, F you.’”
In TikTok, we can see demonstrations of the age-old fact that environments, including technology, shape music. Concept albums were prevalent in the 70s and 80s, but while some artists desired this format, others were encouraged and expected to follow it because “labels made more money when they sold albums rather than when they sold singles,” says music journalist David Turner on a Slate podcast.
My heuristic these days, as someone who doesn’t keep up with the latest pop hits, is that most popular songs come from TikTok. The few hits that manage to trickle into my no-rhyme-or-reason Spotify playlists, like “Positions” by Ariana Grande or “Say So” by Doja Cat, indeed owe much of their prominence to TikTok. But when I watch TikToks, surprisingly I hear familiar songs too. Just two years after TikTok became available worldwide, people are already creating compilations of old TikTok songs for nostalgic purposes. A good amount of songs that the app has boosted have been popular before, whether their heyday was in the early 2010s or the 1970s. Despite this, they all earn the new label “TikTok song” and, with it, new associated collective memories. Like ringtones, songs are mediums “to which new contexts make additions.”
TikTok epitomizes the memetic phenomenon of riffing on music through short videos, but TikTok wasn’t the first place I’d seen it. Musician Charles Cornell went viral on YouTube after he decided, on a whim, to play piano over a video of rapper Cardi B ranting. Cardi B herself retweeted the clip, and Cornell’s social media followings grew to 6 figures overnight. Cornell recalls on his personal website, “I had this stupid idea to make a few videos… where a musician will play along to the rhythmic cadence and even sometimes the pitch of spoken word. [The concept] dates back into the 60s as far we currently know… It makes funny videos way funnier and is wildly entertaining to watch.”
In other words, this was a successful meme format. Cornell rode this wave for several months, playing piano to dozens of iconic videos, sometimes two per day. He memed everything from classic clips from the defunct short-video app Vine, to megachurch pastor Kenneth Copeland trying to blow away the coronavirus. He harmonized with a Terry Crews Old Spice deodorant commercial and made some explainer videos about what it was like to go viral and how to play music like this.
In a video called “Why I Stopped Making Piano Memes,” however, Cornell explains that he found it much more “fulfilling to … create content that helps people understand something.” He has since shifted to making videos around music analysis and education. Much of it is still creative and memetic: “exploring what’s possible” with music could mean playing five versions of Happy Birthday and Row, Row, Row Your Boat, from amateur and off-key to extremely embellished. This transition and affirmation that he “can provide so much more value” than memeing has been “liberating.” Many subscribers stick with him, as well as new sponsors, even after he stopped focusing primarily on easy humor.
Seeing this shift underscored for me how talented some memers are as musicians. Some memers create mashups of vastly different songs. Others produce short, viral-friendly variants of popular songs: happy tunes transposed to a minor key, or remaking a song using sounds produced with household objects. These are nontrivial projects, but given their video length and copyright regulations, I wondered if music memers could find success in creating derivative, remix content.
For traditional artists, like Taylor Swift, legitimacy and success manifests in two categories: monetary and having a cult-following fanbase. You can, of course, have both. Traditionally, the music industry was needed for monetary success and helped artists build a following. What we call “the music industry” actually consists of “three core music industries: the recorded music industry—focused on recording and distribution of music to consumers; the music licensing industry—primarily licensing compositions and arrangements to businesses; and live music—focused on producing and promoting live entertainment, such as concerts, tours, etc.”
Thanks to social media platforms, the paradigm of record labels doing the work to get crowds excited about an artist has been turned on its head. Platforms like Soundcloud, YouTube, Vine, and, more recently, TikTok have been stepping stones to success for several big names in popular music, including Billie Eilish, Post Malone, and Shawn Mendes. The script has been flipped: crowds often discover artists online and form a fanbase before the artist signs onto a record label — that is, if they do at all. Marketing like a meme may have led Lil Nas X to Billboard and record labels, but for some musicians, being “discovered” in the traditional sense is no longer necessary.
Today, music memes are something you can do professionally. Because of this, they impact the music industry in a way they couldn’t before. Audio memes constitute much more than, say, ring tones, which are shaped by the popular music industry much more than vice versa, or film sound effects, which fall more under audio engineering and again are largely independent of the music world. Platforms have also enabled musicians to pursue nontraditional routes. In the case of Charles Cornell, that was being able to produce educational music content for broad layperson audiences.
Two months ago, I stumbled across “bohemian WAPsody” on YouTube — a surprisingly excellent mashup of Cardi B’s explicit “WAP” and Queen’s classic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” rich with harmonies and featuring conservative pundit Ben Shapiro’s awkward reading of the lyrics in the bridge. The mashup was briefly available to stream on Spotify, but only as a “podcast,” likely due to copyright reasons. I was fascinated and began to informally collect what I called “musak” (no connection to “Muzak,” or elevator music):
Hey Soul Sister but it's just the "my untrimmed chest" line (full UNTRIMMED song) — “Hey, Soul Sister” is an upbeat acoustic song that forms the soundtrack of my carefree middle school-era bus rides home. But it has a few lyrics that people has always struck listeners as odd, one being the singer’s mention of his “untrimmed chest.” This remix replaces the majority of the lyrics with that phrase.
Phineas Sings Green Day's 21 Guns — It turns out that if you raise the pitch on any Green Day song, the singing will sound like Phineas, a main character in Disney show Phineas and Ferb.
Take Me Home, Country Roads except I lose all grasp on reality during the chorus — The most-viewed rendition of the “[song] except [change]” subgenre on the channel Nulberry Official.
80s Remix: Backstreet Boys - I Want It That Way — One of many remixes that give 2000s and 2010s hits an 80s vibe. On each of these videos, the comments section conspires to form and joke about a parallel universe, usually where the artist was a one-hit wonder:
These videos span a few different subgenres, but the common thread is that they’re all remixes. In remix, “disparate fragments of culture… are edited together to produce a coherent whole, whose meaning exceeds or differs from any of the source material and stands alone as a finished piece of artwork in itself.” Lawrence Lessig argues that all of culture can be thought of as remix. When we witness and interact with pieces of information, we engage in remixes of our own. Platforms like YouTube have played a significant role in turning society from “read-based” to “read-and-write,” where writing takes on a digital, multimedia meaning, involving not only text but also images, sound, and video.
“United States copyright law as enacted on YouTube” poses obstacles to remixers, as do YouTube’s commercial interests and structures, though to a lesser extent, writes rhetoric scholar Olivia Conti. Charles Cornell acknowledges this in his explanation that he is more than a memer. One reason to shy away from fixating on music memes is that although playing music over videos would likely hold up as fair use in a court of law, there has yet to be a relevant case, leaving ambiguity about its legality. Nonetheless, musicians who produce remix, mashup, and parody work have opportunities to succeed outside the traditional industry by finding fans on social media platforms and financial support through ads or other means.
Adam Wright, a 20-year-old mashup artist and music production student who runs the channel Adamusic, “began posting mashups on YouTube weekly at the start of 2015… for the fun of it.” Over time, as people shared his videos on social media, his channel grew. At age 16, he “had hit 100,000 subscribers and had multiple videos with over a million views.” He says, “I wouldn’t be doing what I am today if it weren’t from my early exposure to music and my platform on Youtube.” However, copyright remains a challenge. He “even lost a whole YouTube channel” due to that. He sells merchandise and runs a Patreon, a set of membership tiers that fans can subscribe to for access to exclusive content. This channel clearly positively impacts his music career.
One of the more cohesive remix subgenres I’ve seen is bardcore, or tavernwave, in which people remake modern songs in an inaccurate-but-comical, stereotypical “medieval” style. Earlier this year, the work of two YouTubers, called Cornelius Link and Hildegard Von Blingin’, “[propelled the genre] to the forefront of Internet fame.” Cornelius Link, a 27-year-old German web developer, uses a combination of modern and medieval instruments — some of which he built himself, as a hobbyist woodworker. Von Blingin’, whose pseudonym is a play on 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, translates lyrics to old-timey language and adding vocals to Link’s instrumental covers. The lyric “all the other kids with the pumped up kicks” becomes “all ye bully-rooks with your buskin boots,” for instance.
Von Blingin’ said in an interview, “People have been genre-flipping modern songs to Medieval covers for years, but when [Cornelius Link’s] videos went viral, it really bolstered the genre.” She posits that, “the interest in medieval covers… is partly thanks to the previous success of 80s remixes of modern songs” and medieval-esque pop culture media like Dungeons & Dragons and Game of Thrones. In turn, those 80s remixes belong to a broader tradition of remix. “Software developments in the 1990s spawned do-it-yourself underground music remixers… splicing together wildly different songs in their work,” write Knobel and Lankshear on remix in relation to literacy.
It’s easy to think of Internet memes and TikTok’s recycling of audio as brand new phenomena. And they are — but not in the way you might expect. They’re old in that they’re memes. Dawkin’s genetics-inspired concept of a meme is applicable here and in so many other fields because it’s fundamentally a way to describe culture — how pieces of media, clothing, and so on spread, get iterated upon and changed, and become part of collective experience. Culture as a whole can be considered remix, epitomized both by amateur producers in the 90s as well as by teens learning TikTok dances. Furthermore, platforms that give rise to music memes provide another way for environments to shape music, as they always have.
The new aspect of music memes is that their significance — economically, culturally — impacts the music industry. Musicians’ ability to directly reach audiences of millions paves new ways for them to “make it” and attain the financials and fanbase that characterize success and legitimacy. Many artists use memes and social media to reach traditional success, but now, this “stepping stone” is a valid, complete path in its own right. ▣