The last great meme

They don't make them like this anymore, or at all.

YouTube the other day recommended to me Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” which doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense; I consume no Korean entertainment to speak of, or anything even adjacent to it. I’m not sure why the algorithm makes these decisions. Of course then again I watched it all the way through. So I guess that’s why.

This is a fun music video. It’s corny, weird, inscrutable in the way that most Asian pop culture is to most Western consumers. It’s a fun way to spend four minutes. But it also occurred to me watching it that “Gangnam Style,” which came out more than 10 years ago, was really the last great universal meme in our culture—the last pop culture touchstone that a ton of people really talked about, referred to in public, asked, “Have you seen this?” That was really it, wasn’t it? The UN Secretary-General did the dance at one point; there were a bunch of flash mobs; Boris Johnson joked about it; Baby Boomers asked their kids, “What’s this Gangnam Style thing?” and then they’d clumsily sing it at family dinners and church gatherings. It was this whole thing.

And that really doesn’t happen anymore. Right? Maybe it does and I’m just missing it, but it feels like we’ve lost those regular sort of shared cultural effusions that were once a regular part of 20th and 21st century living. Remember when everyone was saying “Wazaaaaa” like all the time? That was from a Budweiser Super Bowl commercial. I thought the commercial was really funny but I kind of hated how often we all had to say “Wazaaaaa” back then. It got old real quick. Still, though, it was this interesting shared pop culture moment. I guess the “Walk Like an Egyptian” thing in the 1980s was kind of like that too, right? Didn’t everyone do that?

Obviously we all said “I’ll be back” in an Arnold voice at some point. Definitely in the late 1990s people were going around a lot saying, “Yeah baby!” and “Oh, behave!” like Austin Powers. We all said “You’re fired!” after Donald Trump started saying it on his reality show (it was more like “Yuh fiyud,” but same thing). And people were still saying “Fo shizzle” well into the late 2000s. Even into the social media age we had the thing where if someone took a picture on a digital camera, everyone would say, “Tag me!” That was something we all did for a while until Facebook got really lame around 2010 or so.

Like or hate some or all of these, the point is that we don’t really have the same kind of gentle shared pop culture language today, right? It just doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Mostly what we have is Internet language that’s largely meant to be sort of semi-ironic but kind of not, the sort of thing you say in a tweet or a Buzzfeed post but that you’d never really say in real life: Phrases like, “I’m living rent-free in that guy’s head,” and, “I stan that chick so much,” and, “That guy is such a snack,” and “He understood the assignment.” All of this is meant to be Internet-performative, outrageous in a manner that’s not really communal like the old ways used to be. Even if you dislike the joke itself, you can at least appreciate that “Wazaaaa!” is meant to be something kind of shared between two people in a meaningful way. But what about “YAAASSSSS?” It doesn’t do anything, it’s just a hashtag, it just sits there.

It is, in the end, a loss—yet another instance of a broad shared culture getting crushed and ground up under the wheels of an homogenized cultural milieu becoming increasingly tailor-made for social media and nothing else. Gangnam Style is pretty much the last entry in that category of common experience. Maybe one day we’ll get that back—one day, after everyone gets off Twitter and Facebook and starts living normal lives again. It was better before those things and it can be better after them again too.