The Nutshack, an adult cartoon from 2007, is popularly known as “THE WORST ANIMATED SHOW EVER MADE.” It ran for two seasons (amazingly), has a 2.3 on IMDb and isn’t available on any streaming services.
Its theme song—which consists of a few verses and a chorus that’s just the phrase “It’s the Nutshack” over and over again—is also one of the most meme–tic audio memes on the Internet.
“The Nutshack theme is a good example of a pure audio meme,” self–proclaimed “presiding expert on The Nutshack” Peter Carzis (C’19) said. “No one actually cared about The Nutshack theme before it became a meme.”
As the name might imply, audio memes are heard and passed on through sharing videos (on the Internet) or singing/speaking in real life. Often, they’re songs or lines from songs—some famous, some infamous and some totally unknown. That line from Kanye’s “Father Stretch My Hands Part I” (you know which one) is just as much an audio meme as “We Are Number One,” sung by the villain of Lazy Town, an Icelandic children’s television show.
But there’s an important distinction to be made between the likes of the aforementioned songs and the recent meme–ticization of Migos’ hit song “Bad and Boujee.” According to Carzis, “Bad and Boujee” memes arose only when people started posting the likes of “rain drop, drop top” on Twitter—people were sharing these words rather than the song itself, making “rain drop, drop top” a text–based meme rather than an audio meme.
These categories aren’t rigid; memes that begin as audio memes can cross boundaries and become visual and text–based memes. Carzis and a group of friends, also sophomores, crossed those boundaries—changing their profile pictures to The Nutshack logo, “going through all the ridiculous permutations of The Nutshack theme,” posting them on their own and each other’s walls and finally posting “it’s the Nutshack” in the class Facebook group (which garnered over 40 comments)
Carzis has a theory about what makes any given clip, image or block of text—any easily–transmittable entity—likely to become a meme.
“The Nutshack theme is a meme because it’s absurd," he said. "Its absurdity became popular on the Internet and then spread because it’s hilarious. It’s ridiculous in the same way that the reactions to Harambe getting shot were ridiculous, and the same way that Rage Comics were ridiculous a thousand years ago.”
“The same mechanism undergirds them all: memetic patterns.”
Memes go out of fashion quicker than fashion goes out of fashion, so the below examples may be out–of–date by the time you reach this paragraph of the article—but they’re fine examples of audio memes nonetheless.
THE NUTSHACK
Note that most, if not all, instances of audio memes that take the form of YouTube videos carry a title of the form “X but Y.” (However, beware that not all videos titled in this manner are audio memes.)
WE ARE NUMBER ONE
This, the theme song to the Icelandic children’s show Lazy Town, was named “Meme of the Year” by /r/dankmemes.
ALL STAR
“All Star” was most famously used in Shrek, which has itself (or himself) become a meme. This particular video, too, forms part of an intersection of audio memes: the song is recreated using only sounds from the Windows XP OS, the act of which is something of a meta–meme.
SANDSTORM
Darude’s “Sandstorm”—winner of a Finnish Grammy––was unironically popular at one point, but has lately been subject to many of the same perturbations as the above three songs, including this one.
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