Memetics

It's Modern Art

Memes, a term coined by the biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book “The Selfish Gene”, are an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. ("Merriam-Webster"). Though at the time he would suggest that ideas could possibly hold a place in genetics as much as any other trait, he probably would never have considered the ramifications of his theory, and it’s large transformation to define human interaction with each other online. (Kenneth 2005) Back then the precursors to the internet were in their infancy and the internet as we know it did not exist and the extent of what it would become wasn’t commonly projected. (Stewart 2000) Memetics, the study of memes, became an important part of out culture, and although it is not always discussed vividly in the main stream, it stands as a building block to what our society is. Therefore, prepare yourself for a exhilarating plunge as we dive into wide world of the meme.

Though many memes came on the scene and left to be large successes on the internet, very few make it out to the main stream, and even fewer make it there with out loosing their cult favorite appeal. The Harambe meme, although quite toxic, debatably stayed true to its roots when it hit the big time and became one of the select few.

Harambe was actually a Cincinnati Zoo gorilla that got shot to death after a kid fell into the enclosure, was grabbed by him, and then proceeded to be swung and dragged around (Judah 2017). The question wasn’t if the Gorilla was a threat to the kid, but why the zoo lacked proper procedure, like tranquilizer darts, to handle a situation such as this if it occurred. The incident gained mass attention across the United States with breaking coverage coming from all major networks. The internet took notice, and the distasteful hashtag, “#NeverForget” started being typed on the keyboards of world’s netizens. The joke would proceed for months until it was just about to die down, when the zoo decided to make a statement about their distaste for the joke.(Chan 2016) That’s when the joke moved into 5th gear, becoming a major phenomenon over night, delivering a satirical message on police brutality to every phone and newspaper (Judah 2017).

Dark as it was, and regardless of it’s questionable ethicality, Harambe was a “dank” meme, a class of memes that do not play it safe, that are weird, unusual, and used with unique intent. In the face of being ostracized, dank memes prevail to the eyes and minds of the world through their obvious and unfiltered genuineness. Dank memes don’t just fill the status quo of the fluff you would find in your dollar bin content, but they break it and make a statement, for a dank meme’s integral honesty is it’s highest champion. (Klee 2017)

Now on the other hand diametrically opposing, we have the, the “normie" meme. The normie meme often uses an asset from a existing popular work and provides common sitcom humor to appeal to a larger older audience. ("The Weird Side of the Internet | Episode 10: Normie Schenanigans" 2016) A good example of one that you probably might have seen on Facebook is the popular Minions memes, that reworks promotional material and stills from the *Despicable Me* movies into captioned images of the Minion characters that read into their humorous scenarios. (Marc 2017) Now you may like normie memes, but compared to a dank meme, the honesty and sincerity lacks due to their mass abundance, their lack of effort and their lack of risk. However, the status of a meme as a normie is not static, since humor is objective and public opinion is fact, Therefore, if oddball humor becomes the norm, what we consider as two dimensional, cookie cutter normie click bait, could very well become the new freshest dank meme in this dichotomy, because technically they would be the risk takers.

There is no need for concern, for the majority of humans will alway take the easy way. Systematic, template humor is so very simple to duplicate and spit out by our little sacks of grey matter, so in all likely hood, we will probably continue to do so and everything will stay the same. (Patel 13)

This is what the basis of meme culture is, to find new unique ways to produce entertaining content on the internet, but just consider if we strive to consume only the dankest of the memes, we’ll have to dig a little deeper, wouldn’t we. That’s where SiivaGunner would have you covered.

Imagine being someone who likes video games, in fact someone who has been entertained with them their whole life and one day on your commute to work, a little jingle rattles in your head that continues to hook on for the proceeding hours, preventing you from getting anything accomplished unless you listen to the original tune. You know it’s the battle theme from Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire, so you head to your computer to find the song on the reliable site YouTube. Lord behold, there it is, some friendly video game ripper name SiivaGunner has recently made an upload of the very song you were looking for. So, you being a kind trusting spirit, click on the video to listen to the song, and it’s just as you remembered it, but then the second movement hits. You think to yourself “That’s not right, the melody is familiar but overwhelmingly wrong… Wait a second, is that the Flintstones theme?” Congratulations, you just imagined your first experience with a Grand Dad meme, and more importantly, your first with a high quality rip. You may be confused, but often everyone is at first.

So that hypothetical “high quality rip” was actually the first video to be put on the channel way back on the 9th of January, 2016. The process that was used to make the joke was the process called midi-swapping, in which someone took the sound font, the digital instruments, from the Pokémon game, and the midi files, the music composition documents, of the Pokémon game, into a music editing program and then swapped one of the tracks with one of another midi. The Flintstones melody is the track that’s swapped in this example. ( Taipale 2014)

Now this particular joke that would go on to be popular had context. What made it famous wasn’t just the fact that it sounded clean or was nice to listen to, but that it also had a small cheeky reference to the time an unsuspecting “lets player”,  named Joel booted up a very interesting title on a glorious Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) bootleg, 7 Grand Dad.

Upon starting this game, the title screen reads “7 Grand Dad” and in between the large text lies an 8-bit Super Mario recolored with salmon, dark red, and white and a little Fred Flintstone popping out of a gold star iris. The background is a solid royal blue, and on the bottom, it’s simply marked “1992   1” in white. The game itself ends up just being basic a “sprite” (digital game character) swap of the NES’s title “The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy”, in which all the Fred Flintstone sprites were swapped for ones of Fred Flintstone body with a Super Mario head. It was an odd title to the say the least, but Joel, took it a step further with an audio byte of him yelling the title over and over, in an exclamation of awe. The moment would be infamous with in the fan base, and the Pokémon rip would only take it a step further to popularize it.

Interesting or not, Siivagunner would end up releasing more rips featuring more memes new and old, such as Snowhalation or Gangnam Style, claiming they all were the original and only of the highest quality. From then on, everything released by the channel would be known as a “High Quality Rip” and high quality it remained. What was once just a one man operation, would become an entire community that they would produce post modern content like no one ever had, and maybe it’s to early to say, but potentially they might have pushed society and the art industry to do so as well. That’s just the power of a meme.

Memes are fundamental in that they represent so much of what we are as a species, and even if you have your doubts, they often work there way to do good for the world. Look at SiivaGunner’s biggest success as a meme, “We Are Number One”. What started out as a light hearted music mashup of a song from a popular children’s show, “Lazy Town”, ended up becoming a rallying cry to donate money to the main performer’s GoFundMe for medical expenses when he was diagnosed with cancer. ("We Are Number One but I explain it" 2016) The effort was truly touching and lead to over a hundred fifty thousand dollars being raised for the cause, which was unmatched in its scale.

You see, memes are good, and the sooner you understand that, the better our world will become.

WORKS CITED

Chan, Melissa. "Cincinnati Zoo Is 'Not Amused' by Harambe the Gorilla Memes." *Times* 22 Aug. 2016: 112. Print.

Judah, Sam. "How a dead gorilla became the meme of 2016." *BBC News*. BBC, 01 Jan. 2017. Web. 13 July 2017.

Klee, Miles. "What Is a Dank Meme? Can You Handle the Truth?" *The Daily Dot*. N.p., 29 Mar. 2017. Web. 13 July 2017.

"Meme." *Merriam-Webster*. 2017 Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, n.d. Web. 13 July 2017.

Mondschein, Kenneth. "Meme." *New Dictionary of the History of Ideas*, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz, vol. 4, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005, pp. 1416-1418. *Gale Virtual Reference Library*,

Patel, Ronak. "First World Problems:' a Fair Use Analysis of Internet Memes." *UCLA Entertainment Law Review*, vol. 20, no. 2, July 2013, pp. 235-256. EBSCO*host*,

Stewart, William. "IPTO -- Information Processing Techniques Office." *IPTO - Information Processing Techniques Office*. N.p., 7 Jan. 2000. Web. 13 July 2017.

Snetiker, Marc. "Despicable Me 3." *Entertainment Weekly*, no. 1463/1464, 28 Apr. 2017, pp. 44-46. EBSCO*host*,

Taipale, Joshua. ""MIDI-Slapping" and Why You Should Never Do It | Ongaku Concept: Video Game Music Theory." *YouTube*. Ongakuconcept, 06 Sept. 2014. Web. 13 July 2017.

Logan. "The Weird Side of the Internet | Episode 10: Normie Schenanigans." *YouTube*. Internauts, 08 July 2016. Web. 13 July 2017.

123zc1. "We Are Number One but I explain it." *YouTube*. 123zc1, 11 Dec. 2016. Web. 13 July 2017.