The Worst Memes in Music

When people hear the word ‘meme’ today, they think of disapproving boyfriends, Sean Bean (because ‘one does not simply…’), Rick Astley, and Pepe the Frog.

The word has been subsumed by internet culture to refer to viral combinations of text, image, and video that can be adapted by new users and reapplied hilariously to novel contexts.

But the word ‘meme’ actually predates the internet.

It began with Richard Dawkins—the evolutionary biologist/Christian-baiter—in his seminal work ‘The Selfish Gene’.

He coined the term 'meme' to refer to the cultural equivalent of a gene.

Whilst genes are strands of genetic code that pass through the generations, undergoing new mutations in response to the survival pressures of their environment, memes are ideas that pass from brain to brain and do the same thing.

To illustrate, back in 1976, Dawkins cited examples such as catch-phrases, architectural trends, and even ancient methods of pot-making—things you could observe proliferating through a culture and changing as they spread from place to place.

He pointed out how these ideas would disseminate, gradually taking root in the cultural gene-pool (or, I suppose, meme-pool) of ideas.

And, in doing so, they would subtly mutate and adapt to keep up with the world around them.

A little like his own term did in the age of social media.

I bring this up because occasionally I’m struck by a meme (in the Dawkinsian sense of the word) that strikes me as being, like the human appendix, a strange and fairly useless thing.

These are generally verbal, and for some reason, I find them quite annoying.

I'm sure you'll have heard them too.

Listen out for the next time you are in a restaurant and someone orders ‘full fat’—as opposed to diet—coke.

There’s no such thing.

There is no fat in coke.

Imagine how disgusting it would be if there were.

This seems to be a meme that has somehow spread from the world of milk to the world of fizzy drinks.

What people mean is ‘coke containing sugar’.

Then watch carefully for the next time you notice someone speaking directly into a camera on their Instagram story.

They’re almost bound to start by telling you how they ‘just thought they’d jump on’ (as if they hadn’t already done three botched takes and spent the whole morning in a state of anxiety).

What do they mean?

Why ‘jumping’?

There’s no ‘jumping’ involved.

And yet this seems to be our verb of choice for anything involving video communication. We 'jump' on zoom calls, teams meetings, facetime, Facebook Live. We rarely 'jump' anywhere else (barring onto trampolines or in front of the occasional train).

Before I start sounding too much like a struggling observational comic, let me walk you through three of the memes that I feel have been polluting the world of pop music for far too long.

These are like lyrical parasites that have, somehow, passed through the cultural memepool and continue to crop up in song after song despite obviously being awful.

Here we go:

1. ‘Mr DJ’

See:

• ‘Hey Mr DJ, put a record on, I want to dance with my baby’—Music, Madonna.
• 'Come on play that song (now Mr. DJ) Play it all night long' - Play, Jennifer Lopez.

I’d love to ask Rihanna, Madonna, and Jennifer Lopez (among countless others) who this Mr DJ is, why he’s always a man, and why they insist on addressing him as if they were writing a letter to their bank manager.

I’ve performed alongside DJs at many events and I’ve never heard anyone get their attention by calling them ‘Mr DJ’.

If only they were that polite.

You’re far more likely to hear a torrent of drunken abuse, followed by a threat of violence if they don’t immediately play "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield.

1. ‘High’ (sung in falsetto)

See:

• ‘friends around the campfire, and everybody’s hiiiiiiigh’—Rocky Mountain High, John Denver.
• ‘there’s nothing like your loving to get me hiiiiiiiiigh’—Tennessee Whiskey, Chris Stapleton.
• ‘High, high, high, high / High, high, high, high’—High, The Lighthouse Family.

This one is just patronizing.

I’m all for form reflecting content to some degree, but we can already hear that the lyric is ‘high’.

We don’t need it to be sung at a higher pitch than all the other words.

We’re all happy with the concept of ‘high’: spatially, psychologically, and pharmaceutically.

Don’t even get me started on a bottom octave ‘low’.

1. Any song that nostalgically plays on references to other songs/musicians.

See:

• ‘I got them moves like Jagger’—Moves Like Jagger, Maroon 5.
• ‘Let’s Marvin Gaye and get it on’—Marvin Gaye, Charlie Puth.
• ‘Singing 'Sweet Home Alabama' all summer long’—All Summer Long, Kid Rock.

I think what upsets me the most about this one is that it feels like a cheap trick—you invoke something great from the past to forge an emotional connection with the listener that the actual song rarely warrants.

In the case of the three listed—three of the worst songs I’ve ever heard—I think it’s tantamount to musical blasphemy.

If you think I’m missing any, you know where to find me. In the meantime…

Keep dreaming,

Rob