On my last few working trips to Europe, I would tune in to German MTV from time to time. Somehow inanity dubbed or subtitled into German is more engaging than plain old English inanity. But if you watch for more than a few minutes, you will see, endlessly repeated, these bizarre little commercials for special songs and ringtones to download into your mobile phone (that is, after they’re permanently encoded into your neural network) … The most popular one seems to be this little singing and dancing chick called Sweety das Küken. If you’ve never seen Sweety, maybe that’s for the best. If you’re really curious, go ahead and google, but mostly you will find video along the lines of “Sweety in a Blender,” the sure-fire sign of Internet mega-memedom. (Europeans are now completely obsessed with the customized ringtones. It’s not uncommon to see a senior executive at the second largest company in France run out of a meeting clutching a phone blaring something ridiculous like Dragostea Din Tei, a hit Romanian techno tune.)
And if you happen to make a video of yourself chair-dancing (Roadie!) to this same techno tune, you become instantly famous a la William Hung. This story has hit the Times a few days ago. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you owe it to yourself to watch. For me, I think the kid is genuinely talented, if a little misguided. Sorry to hear that he’s so distressed by all this unwanted attention.
I don’t know how I managed to miss it the first time around, but in 2003 a teenager from Quebec, who became known as the Star Wars Kid, inspired countless video post-production hacks to produce hundreds of minutes of video based on the kid’s 1:48 clip of himself practicing Jedi arts. This one is funny to watch too, but the attention SWK got was a little more mean spirited. Just google “star wars kid” and you’ll be amazed at how much stuff is out there.
And it’s not an iMeme, but Roxy Music’s “Do the Strand” must be a virus from outer space…
Numa Numa, Yay!
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