Five classic songs utterly ruined by memes
When looking out at the memes and brainrot-infested hellscape we trudge through to live out our barren, yet inexplicably expensive lives, it’s easy to find yourself thinking, “What the fucking hell happened?!” at least three times an hour.
Surely it wasn’t always like this? There’s something wrong that can be fixed, right? This is a perversion of what life is really meant to be! When we get this desperate, it’s easy to blame it all on the internet, and we’re not wrong to…but we’re not right either.
It’s the thing that shapes our lives in the 21st century, sure. However, it’s always worth remembering that no matter how much of an oppressive force it feels like, no matter how often it feels like it has a mind of its own, human beings are still essentially in charge of it. That sounds like an optimistic viewpoint until the other shoe drops. The idea that this is the “current hellscape we’re living in” is false. The world has always been like this. Humans have always communicated like this, and there’s no better proof of this than the source of the word “meme”.
The past two decades have seen the term become not only a commonly used word but also, let’s be real here, the way that we communicate, shorthand hieroglyphs built to phrase the goings-on of the day in a way that draws a laugh. Yet, such a modern phrase was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, who himself was drawing on schools of thought set out by philosophers in the late 1800s. We have always sought to communicate in a way that devalues and ridicules the very thing we’re communicating about.
Thus, when the internet developed to the point that we could communicate with music in a way that we couldn’t before, the damage that was done to some spectacular songs was immediate and devastating. Today, several of the best songs of their age live a second life as memes, a fate akin to being reincarnated back into this world as a toilet bowl. They’re more than worth a second look away from their current fate, so here are five songs we can rescue from meme-ification if we just give them the chance.
Five classic tracks that were meme-fied
‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ – Rick Astley
We begin with a song truly lost to the dark and terrifying world of memes. These days, one can separate Rick Astley’s deathless debut single ‘Never Gonna Give You Up‘ from the 20-year-old Rickroll meme as easily as one can separate Jack White from jokes about his “big sister”. One can argue that it led to a major resurgence for a man whose career was well and truly a thing of the past. However, considering the whole joke was clicking on something you were interested in and finding a trashy relic of the 1980s, he had a right to feel like the joke was on him.
The thing is, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ sounds trashy on first listen, but give it more time, and something strange happens. Sure, the Stock, Aitken and Waterman production job on the track creaks harder than a hundred-year-old Ferris wheel that’s never known a spray of WD40 in its life, but the song underneath it is actually pretty stellar. A solid gold pop song anchored by a rare and wonderful example of baritone vocals in pop music. It will never not be a meme, but it does deserve a little better.
‘Roundabout’ – Yes
Chalk this one up to two conflicting pop cultural uses: one of the song’s title and one of its opening notes. In 2003, I first heard of this song as the go-to example of a rock keyboard solo that Dewey Finn recommends to piano prodigy Lawrence in Richard Linklater’s masterpiece School of Rock. Thing is, Mr Schneebly isn’t wrong, but that’s not how anyone knows of the song today. For that, we have to look to the world of anime and how an iconic cut to credits gave the Yes classic a new lease on life via the medium of memes.
Every episode of the first season of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure ends with the opening notes of the song drifting over the climactic events of the episode, before dropping the words “to be continued” as that iconic bass riff crashes in. You almost certainly know this, because adding this 30-second slice of Yes to any mildly amusing video has become a tediously overused meme. If you like the music, though, you’re in luck. There are about eight more minutes of it to enjoy on the actual song!
‘What’s Up?’ – 4 Non Blondes
Christ, this one takes me back. More than any of the other songs in this list, this is some deep millennial shit. Perhaps it feels doubly vintage due to the fact that the very meme that featured the wailing chorus of the 4 Non Blondes’ one-hit also focuses on a fellow icon of Gen X nostalgia, He-Man. Thus, I’m confronted with something that felt vintage at the time, 20-odd years after the fact. Yikes on bikes. If it sounds like I’m stressing about getting old, don’t worry, it’ll happen to you, too.
Unfortunately, this meme is so omnipresent that most probably think that it uses the original version of ‘What’s Up?’, which it absolutely doesn’t. It’s actually a pretty slick mash-up of the 1993 DJ Miko eurodance remix of the song, interpolated with Melissa Manchester’s ‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’. The original version from 1992 is a rollicking piece of pop-rock that’s well worth a second listen if you can separate it from memes featuring a certain yodelling cartoon character with a pageboy haircut.
‘The Sound of Silence’ – Simon & Garfunkel
Weirdly enough, this song was kind of a meme in the first place, and no, I’m not talking about the laughable Disturbed cover of this Simon & Garfunkel classic. The truth is that achingly straight and profoundly unhip Simon & Garfunkel were the laughing stock of the Greenwich Village folk scene. In particularly spiteful corners of the Gaslight Cafe scene, any act singing the opening lyrics of this song was enough to send a packed-out coffeehouse full of scenesters into hysterics.
Smash cut to 60 years later, and while Simon & Garfunkel have got their flowers as some of the biggest hitmakers of the entire 1960s and beyond, the very same thing happens. Except this time, it’s people watching videos on their telephones and hearing those immortal, harmonised words “hello darkness my old friend” playing over videos of strangers reacting to something bad happening to them. One wonders what those beatniks would think of memes now. They’d probably love them.
‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’ – The Shangri-Las
Oh no, no, no, no, no. How could this possibly happen?! How could one of the best songs of the entire 1960s become one of the most hated memes ever! Of all the songs in this list, this is the one that feels the most personal. Just ignore the fact that this song came out 30 years before I was born, and focus on the fact that it’s utter magic from start to finish. Not that you could tell by the way people react to those pitched-up “Oh Nos”.
In fairness to them, they obviously do not belong to the original Shangri-Las classic. In 2005, rapper Capone (who, like Mary Weiss and co, was also Queens born and bred), sampled the song’s pre-chorus, pitched it up five semitones and used it for the beat of his track ‘Streets Favourite’.
15 years later, fellow rapper Kreepa used that beat as the basis for his song ‘Oh No’, which is the version used in the meme, the version reviled by so many. The two of them unwittingly set the TikTok trend of songs with the vocals pitched up a few years early. This alone would be grounds for trial at The Hague, but to do it via the medium of one of the best girl-group songs ever? Truly heinous. Set the record straight by throwing on the original Shangri-Las classic; you will not regret it.
