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Editor’s Note: This article is part of Know Your Meme’s annual review series looking back at some of the most memorable and popular memes, events and people that defined internet culture in 2018 as we know it.
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onfusion, oldies and idiots took center stage in 2018’s music meme landscape. Some of the top music memes of the year played on the radical disconnect between a song’s content and the meme’s joke. One of our top ten finds people risking death for viral fame, and another one was so abhorrent and miserable everyone on the planet should be ashamed for making it a thing (and no, it isn’t 6ix9ine). There was also a lot to like about the music memes of 2018: three of the ten top music memes of the year reference songs released before 1984, all of which are absolute bangers, while one music meme provided a vehicle for some of the most creative remixes this side of “Steamed Hams.” Overall, meme music in 2018 was a mixed bag full of bizarre revivals, puzzling trends, one-hit wonders and Kanye West farts. Actually, come to think of it, that’s how it is every year.
Well, we finally did it. We killed “Africa” by Toto. More specifically, Weezer killed “Africa” by Toto, but more on that in a moment.
“Africa” is an amazing song. Critically brushed aside at the time of release, Toto’s ode to the massive continent came back in style in the 2010s thanks to a cultural reevaluation of 80s cheese in the form of vaporwave as well as the song’s over-the-top earnest chorus, deceptively tricky verses, and bitchin’ keyboard solo. Over the course of the decade it returned to the forefront of the internet in the forms of dozens of covers and parodies.
And then Weezer got a hold of it. Weezer has a history of using memes in extremely dorky ways, trotting out all the YouTube stars of 2006 in their Pork and Beans video and referencing Damn Daniel in 2016’s California Kids. This year, Weezer responded to a tweet from a 14 year old who wanted them to cover “Africa.” They did. It was kinda cool (though not as cool as their tight AF Rosanna cover).
Then they did it again and again, spending the year going on live television to play “Africa”, employing Weird Al Yankovic to parody Rivers Cuomo in an “Africa” video, and essentially committing the cardinal sin of memeing: don’t overplay the joke. “Africa” has had an amazing run this decade gaining the cultural relevance it rightfully deserves. But it’s time to give it a rest.
After “Africa,” the other oldie the internet collectively went nuts over in 2018 was John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The song has remained a pop culture staple since it was released in 1972, appearing in numerous films at critical plot points to lend scenes emotional gravitas, but it wasn’t until 2018 that a Fallout 76 teaser reminded everyone that this song fuckin’ slaps.
The period between that teaser and Fallout 76’s colossal shit of a release was a golden age for "Take Me Home, Country Roads." Suddenly memes about the track flooded subreddits and parodies swept through YouTube. RTGames began using the track in streams watched millions of times. All at once, the internet remembered that “Take Me Home, Country Roads” was an amazing song, and each new parody seemed to add to the song’s legacy as a crowd-pleasing banger. Who knows what John Denver would think of the things the internet has done to his song, but one hopes he’s looking down from (almost) heaven with a grin on his face.
Despacito Don’t Die. Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber’s ultra-popular 2017 hit holds the record for most-viewed YouTube video of all time and the honor of appearing on back-to-back KnowYourMeme Music Memes of the Year lists. In this 2018 edition, we celebrate the myriad ways “Despacito” spread throughout meme culture, primarily the memes “Despacito 2” and “Alexa Play Despacito.”
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“Despacito 2,” of course, highlights the desire to return to a time when the song was inescapable, while “Alexa Play Despacito” (or more accurately, “This Is So Sad Alexa Play Despacito”) underlines the rush of dopamine that comes with every silky “Deeeespaaaaacito.” Both memes illustrate the song’s lasting effect on pop culture, a sugar high pop music hasn’t experienced in years. Of course, both are meant somewhat ironically, but the side effect of the constant memeing of “Despacito” is the deepening appreciation for just how good that song is. If we ever do get a “Despacito 2,” there’s no doubt in my mind the world would embrace it with open arms and welcome its return to supermarket background muzak with a knowing, warm smile.
There were a lot of great music memes that didn’t make this list. There was Gabriel Gundacker’s tightly effective parody of mediocre animated films with his over-the-top song Zendaya Is Meechee. There was Doja Cat’s silly but undeniable earworm Moo. Then there was this kid.
As if crafted by the algorithm that spits out guests for Ellen Degeneres, Mason Ramsey donned an old cowboy outfit, bleated like a goat in a Walmart and became an American sensation. He hit the perfect sweet spot of wholesome, old-timey, and precocious to immediately become the worst thing that you couldn’t escape from. His butchering of Hank Williams’ “Lovesick Blues” was the type of middle-America porn ripe for Moms to share in Facebook posts with captions like “Everything is so divisive right now, but this talented young man made me smile! :)” His rooster-squawking eventually landed him a spot at goddamn-Coachella and internet users spoofed him in videos that only served to remind everyone of how meme culture is just as susceptible to the very boomer crap it rails against. This kid sucks.
Kanye West spent another year being a monstrous ass, accidentally doing a fascism and going on a rant so unhinged even Donald Trump was like dude, wtf? He also got around to releasing some music, some of which was literally poop, some figuratively poop. Of the latter was “I Love It,” his collaboration with Soundcloud meme rapper Lil Pump.
The video featuring the two rappers bobbling like Roblox characters in giant suits marked another baffling move from West, whose verse on the track will most likely be remembered for his repetition of the line “I’m a sick fuck, I like a quick fuck.” It was a gift to memelords online, and was naturally parodied in numerous videos and photoshops. With critics and fans agreeing that his 2018 album Ye was nowhere near his best work, perhaps 2018 marked the year Kanye West fully embraced his own memehood and we can all finally admit he hasn’t released any good music since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (oh SNAP).
Any viral challenge that requires a police intervention is alright in my book, which is what happened with the “In My Feelings Challenge.” The hit from Drake’sScorpion inspired people to jump out of moving cars and dance alongside it, leading to hilarious fails and terrific facepalms. Observe:
The song itself is fine, but what came of it was a ridiculous lesson in Darwinism. The popularity of this dangerous and dumb challenge led the Chief of Safety Advocacy at the National Transportation Safety Board to say, “don’t do this, you stupid idiots” (essentially). The ante was upped when it was announced that doing the “In My Feelings Challenge” could net participants up to a year in prison. Basically, the lesson here is don’t do anything because of Drake.
It is scientifically impossible to not enjoy “Crab Rave.” Just look at these guys:
All these crabs havin’ the time of their lives. With its catchy melody and infectious beat, Noisestorm’s “Crab Rave” is delectable internet content. It appeared in remixes all through 2018, including a bizarre period where it was used in a gag with depressing messages such as “My wife left me” and “I want to die”; truly memes work in mysterious ways. The Crab Rave may not have been the most original meme to come out of 2018, but it was certainly one of the most enjoyable to listen to.
Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” illustrates that you can never tell the internet what not to meme. Donald Glover’s dark and snaky bop on racial politics in America and the track’s powerful video blew critics and fans away the second it dropped, and as the listens piled up, so did the memes.
Simple object-labeling memes and remix videos of “This Is America” spread, going against the very message of Gambino’s song. In Hiro Murai’s music video, Glover dances while atrocities happen in the background, demonstrating the role black entertainment has in distracting viewers from the problems in the black community, particularly racially disproportionate police brutality. Vice attempted to step in and tell people that memeing the song was essentially proving Gambino’s dystopian vision of the country correct, but of course, this only led to the creation of more memes. While the memeing of “This Is America” may have been a disservice to the art itself, it undeniably left a mark on the internet’s conscious that was felt throughout the year.
While City Pop, a genre of hitherto-forgotten glistening bangers from 1980s Japan, had been spreading through the internet through most of the 2010s thanks to its prevalence in the vaporwave community, 2018 saw its emergence as a dominant force online, and no song is more responsible for that trend than “Plastic Love.” Mariya Takeuchi’s 1984 sleeper hit has over 23 million views on YouTube at the time of writing thanks in large part to a ridiculously friendly YouTube algorithm that seemed to put it in everyone’s recommendations.
As YouTube force-fed the track into public consciousness, YouTubers got to work analyzing and paying tribute to Takeuchi’s hit. It grew into a singularly bizarre music meme, not as widely parodied as, say, Boney M’s “Rasputin” or “Shooting Stars”, but simply shared on the basis that it’s a really good song. Its legacy is all over current music trends, as pristine disco returns to the mainstream. In fact, one of K-pop’s biggest stars, Yubin, had to cancel the release of one of her songs because it sounded too much like “Plastic Love.” Takeuchi has had a very respectable career in her lifetime, but one wonders if she knows (and if so, how she feels) about the popularity her forgotten dancefloor hit has had in 2018.
Man, “Bongo Cat” rules. In many ways, “Bongo Cat” was the successor to the wildly popular “Steamed Hams” meme in that it was a video remix meme that just kept getting better. It all started when Twitter user @DitzyFlama upped a remix of a cat playing bongos to “Athletic” from the Super Mario World soundtrack.
And then, as with “Steamed Hams,” the joke was taken to incredible heights. At first Bongo Cat was mixed with the usual suspects (“Africa,” “Running in the 90s,” “Rasputin,” for example) but soon the remixes grew more obscure and the animations more elaborate. Wild edits include “We All Lift Together” from Warframe and “Rivers in the Desert” from Persona 5. The amount of creativity and artistic skill displayed in participants of the “Bongo Cat” meme was stunning, making it easily one of the most entertaining “upping the ante” meme arcs of the year.
