Endless Thread - Looking for a Man, Finding a Record Deal

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

In April, a TikTok creator mused, "Did I just write the song of the summer?" Girl on Couch's "Looking for a man in finance" song spawned hundreds of remixes, and won her a record deal. While it might seem remarkable that a five-second TikTok sound can command the attention of pop music kingmakers, the industry has been capitalizing on internet memes for decades. Endless Thread takes a crash course in internet meme pop music history. Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter . Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The hosts are Amory Sivertson, Ben Brock Johnson, and Grace Tatter.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Ben and Amory, happy almost summer. Yeah. How are you? Grace Tanner. I'm great. I'm jumping the gun a little bit. It's not really summer until A, June 21st, and B, we've all agreed on at least a few contenders for the song of the summer. Do you guys have any possibilities? Feel good song of the summer? Yeah, we got to have one. I default, Grace, to the Queens of the Stone Age song,

Feel Good Hit of the Summer. Hmm. Yeah, and it goes, nicotine, Vicodin, Valium. Oh, shh, I can't remember how it goes. It's a drug song. Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, Marijuana, Ecstasy, and Alcohol. Kukukukkokane.

But that's not really a feel-good hit of the summer. That's just a drug song from a Stone Ageeon. or rock band. Anyway, please go on. So a few weeks back, a creator on TikTok, whose account is called Girl on Couch, posted a video with text overlay that reads, did I just write the song of the summer? Yes. Everyone probably knows what this is.

Yep, I know girl on the couch. I do not know. Okay. Well, I'm going to send you a clip of this video. Here we go. I'm looking for a man in finance. The trust fund. Six-five, blue eyes. Finance. Trust fund. Six-five, blue eyes. I'm looking for a man. I'm looking for a man. I'm looking for it. Looking for it. Looking for it. Finance. Trust fund. Six-five. Blue-eyes. Is this the original? Yeah, that's the original. Okay. Interesting. Because I've seen many of the iterations, but I didn't know what the original was. Yeah, I think I saw a tweet that referenced this, but I did not know what they were talking about.

Can you read the caption of the video for me? Can someone make this into an actual song, please, just for funzies? Okay, so the internet truly delivered on this. There were remixes on remixes. A million variations. You're looking for a guy in medicine. PhD. Must be Indian.

Freelance. Five, sex. Tattoes, Bushwick. And just weeks after posting this TikTok, girl on couch, got a record. got a record deal for this. I mean, Amory is going to be madder about this than me as a actual musician, but this is ridiculous. She didn't even make the song. She just said something in a sing-songy way, kind of and asked other people to make a song of it.

It's true, yeah, but apparently that's enough these days. So the label Capital Polydor Virgin Germany signed her. That's a lot of record labels in one. There's clearly a lot of mergers and acquisitions in that name. Clearly. And they released an official version, a remix with the DJ duo Bill and Ted. That came out in May. And then on June 7th, they released another remix with the producer David Gedda.

I'm looking for a man in finance. Just Fun. Six-five. Just fun. Girl on Couch. Her real name is actually Megan Boney. Also got a publishing deal with Universal Music, which is one of the biggest. labels out there like Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, etc., etc. So now she'll get royalties whenever

her song, song-like combination of words, is sampled. I'm looking for a man in finance. Just Fun. Six-five. Blue Eyes. Song of the summer or not, there's been a lot of talk about how this girl on the couch sound has really been a defining moment in how the music industry is shaped by internet culture, or warped by, depending who you ask, but I think the history of the internet meme to pop song pipeline is actually much longer than people realize. So today we're going to do a crash course in meme music history. I'm so ready for this one. I'm in. Okay. So if you had to guess when the first kind of mainstream meme pop music crossover was, how far back would you go? Well, when we did our

meme series. Did any of those memes go back further than 2006? I'm going to say 2006. It's probably much earlier than that, but let's say 2006. I'm going to say like 2000. Well, we are actually, for the first like meme that turns into a charted song, we're going to go all the way back to 1999. So you're close then to the hamster dance. Oh. Nice. Oh, still slaps. I love it. You know what's messed up is this is one I don't know. What?

Yeah. Ben Brock Johnson doesn't know the hamster dance. Here we go. I don't think I know the hamster dance. Oh, man. That's delicious. I wouldn't have known it was called the hamster dance. Really?

But I knew it because it was very, very popular among the elementary school set. And, yeah, my elementary school PE teacher would play it, we would do unicycle performances. And this was like one of the songs that she played during the unicycle performance. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What kind of circus clown show PE class was this? I don't know. I hated it. So this like gives me like a sensory memory of like pushing off like the wall of my elementary school gym on a wobbly unicycle. That was just your PE teacher like making fun of you guys. Being like, yeah, yeah, no, it's good for you. Go. Yeah, never ever, ever came in handy again. But I wouldn't have remembered what the song was called or where it came from. But fortunately, Alexandria

Arieta helped me excavate this deep memory. She's a PhD candidate at USC's Annenberg School of Communications in Los Angeles. I study the relationship between popular music and internet memes, as well as music creator platforms. And she told me that the hamster dance was actually one of the earliest internet memes just in general. It was on the this web hosting service called Geo Cities, where people would open up this page and it would be a bunch of dancing hamsters to this song that was from the Disney's animated movie Robin Hood. And I guess the internet in 1999 was just a different place because I found a screen recording of the website and I just like don't get why this would have been so funny. Maybe you can illuminate me. Oh, yeah, this is it.

You are seeing just little cartoon hamsters. Some of them have their arms up and they're just like spinning 360. Others are jumping in the air. It's like also very basic like early internet animation. Yeah. Like you would see these all over GeoCity sites, right? They're almost like clip art, but they move. But honestly, I mean, I think the humor in it is more in the story.

song than in the it's not like what's on screen is so hilarious. It's that the song is, you know, it's got the little hamster filter, the little chipmunk voice feature going on. Once that beat drops, it's like

who, yes, hamsters! It's a catchy beat, which I guess is why a bunch of EDM groups started doing remixes of this. One group was called the Cuban boys out of the UK. They were charted in the UK.

And then another group was the boom tag boys based in Canada. And that also charted in Canada and became a really big hit in Radio Disney. Which is possibly why Ben, the EDM version, alluded you. Maybe you were past Radio Disney at that point in your life. Yeah, so that's the first. example of like a popular song that started with a meme that we know of. So now we're going to fast forward to 2004 just a few years later. Do you all remember this?

Yeah, this is the guy I'm remembering. The guy sitting at his computer. Yeah. Yes, love that guy. I loved this so much. Yes. Yeah, I think that anyone who is like at all sentient at this time, time we'll know this video exactly. It's this young man from New Jersey, Gary Bulsma,

lip syncing to a pop song released the previous year by a Moldovan pop group called Ozone. Do you remember where you first saw this video? I want to say like eBom's world or something would be my guess. I've actually never seen this video. I know the song. You've never seen this? Oh, man. It's so enjoyable. No. I was a gymnastics coach in this time of my life. And so, So both hamster dance and this song were on a mix that we would play for kids in the gym while they were, you know, while they were going through their stations. And so I know the song very well, but no, do not know the video. Oh, love this. Amory, you might have been one of the only people in the United States of America who didn't watch this video.

It was uploaded in 2004 to a website called New Grounds, which I think was like a gaming website. Okay. It was copied onto a ton of other websites, and that's where a lot of people first saw it. But then in early 2005, YouTube was founded, and this was one of the first viral videos on YouTube. And it had real staying power. According to a BBC article, it was still one of the most viral videos of all time in 2007, nearly three years after Gary first uploaded it. This is proof positive that, like, sometimes a huge. huge hit can just be like the weirdest freaking thing of somebody just like being themselves in like a

very weird way and everybody somehow relating to that, which I love. It was a more innocent time. And I think something else that really shows that is how much slower our culture metabolized the stuff back then. Because this meme didn't make its top 40 debut in the U.S. until 2008 when it was sampled in the T.I. song, Live Your Life, Featuring Rihanna, or Rihanna, however you want to say it. Was it something from the video carried over into the video for this song? Or is it just, are we just talking like sampling at this point? It was just the song, the original Moldovan song that was sampled.

Gary was not at all credited in the songwriting credits. The band was. But I feel like they wouldn't have sampled it without the viral. video to go with it. Like it was a reference to the meme. That's how most people knew the song, unless they were in a gymnastics gym. Sure.

That makes sense. This to me is like an early example of the like internet pop star feedback loop, right? Like re-re, whatever re-retouches turns to gold, as we all know, and maybe T.I.2. But like, they basically like took this thing that was like very popular on the internet and turned it into a hook. which then like further exploded its popularity, I would imagine, right? Yeah. And it's just interesting to me, though, that they took a meme from four years ago.

Like, I don't know if that would happen anymore. Like, it's hard to imagine now. I don't know what's a meme from four years ago. Like, would that end up in a pop song? Like, would people think that that would resonate? Or would it seem like, oh, that's just old news? Well, I don't know. I mean, having not seen the video, I already sound so old saying that.

not seen the film. That's just a great melody. And, like, sampling, this is where the line gets a little blurry for me, because, like, I didn't see the video, but I just said, that's a great melody. And, of course, they brought it back. And that happens all the time. And, like, Rihanna or Rihanna, or however you want to pronounce it, she also brought back, like, Mama Say, Mama Sal Mamakusa from Michael Jackson from 1986.

is when Thriller became really popular. Maybe it was like 1985 that the album came out. But to me, it's just like resurrecting great melodies and hooks. What was that one that's like, oh, you spin my head right round, right around? Who brought that back? Someone brought that back. Was it also around? Well, that wasn't the flowrida song, right?

Oh, flowriding. Okay. So, yeah, I don't know how much of it is like bringing back the meme versus just like this hook slaps. But maybe. Happy to be wrong. No, that's a good point. In this case, the producer of Live Your Life did actually cite Gary's video specifically as his inspiration for using that Moldovan pop song as the hook. But you're right, it is a bop and maybe he still would have used it if he'd found it some other way. And I think this just kind of shows that it's really hard to tell where a meme starts and where a pop song begins or vice versa. And that only gets more tangled up as we move toward the present day, which we will.

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Okay, so as we get closer and closer to 2024, the meme pop music pipeline really accelerates. There are so many examples from the past few years, but I think the next stop on our very abridged journey through this rich history has to be Old Town Road, Lil Nas X, 2019. That's my To the old time road I'm going to ride Till I can't know That's my favorite one Yeah, it was the song of that summer

Of 2019, absolutely Connected also to a video game That came out around the same time Like when we talked about My When we talked about that one, that one it took the rappers and the musicians, the singers,

whatever we would call Rihanna and TI, it took them years to like take the internet meme and turn it into a hit, right? Whereas like this, now the like cycle is speeding up, right? Like Lil Nas X like basically like takes this idea from a video game Red Dead Red Dead Redemption 2 and like very quickly turns it into a massive hit, right? Yeah, he posted this in actually late 2018, but by April 2019, this song is absolutely everywhere. Here is pop music researcher Alexandria Arieta again. I really believe that that song in particular helped to user us into this current era of popular music,

which I would characterize as the TikTok era, where a lot of artists are thinking about virality and they're thinking about how their songs can circulate in memes. So Lil Nasax was already big on Twitter before he posted this song. he knew the ins and outs of social media from running a Nikki Minaj stand count. So he was thinking about social media very intentionally. He specifically made the song short and was thinking about these comedic lines that could be easily circulated as memes. But a lot of it is about like audiovisual pairings too. And so him starting these early kind of memes and play around the song where people were putting images and videos and videos of horse riding.

with the song, help to propel it. I'm going to send you all a video of some of the early TikToks that were with this. So there's a person in normal everyday clothes, and then as soon as the beat drops on the, I got the horses in the back, they like jump up. And when they land, they're suddenly in stereotypical cowboy, cowgirl attire, flannel cowboy hats doing little jigs. So this is huge on TikTok, this kind of

This kind of trend, this audio-visual pairing actually predates TikTok. There was, remember that trend in 2013, the Harlem Shake, this was on YouTube, and there would be like one person in a room dancing. Usually they were wearing like a mask or weird costume. and then the beat would drop, and there would be a jump cut to everyone in the room dancing. That song charted that year in 2013, in part because that was when Billboard started to include video streams in their calculations. So figuring out this audio-visual pairing is really key. And Lil Nas X does that.

He signs with Columbia Records and releases a version with Billy Ray Cyrus. Of course. There was another viral TikTok dance for that version. And to this day, Old Town Road is the longest running song on the Billboard Top 100 ever. Whoa. That is wild to me, but also not necessarily undeserved. Okay, so we've been talking about examples of things that start out as memes and then end up being big songs. But Lil Nasax kind of illustrated how a lot of artists could reverse engineer that, right? They could write their songs so they become memes rather than the other way around.

So a lot of independent artists have used TikTok to find audiences and connect with new listeners. And it's not just lesser known artists who find TikTok very helpful. Earlier this year, Universal Music pulled all of its music from TikTok. But right before Taylor Swift's new album came out, we started seeing videos with her songs again. Oh, yeah. It's unclear how that happened, but somehow they worked out a deal to get Taylor Swift's catalog back on the platform. And what that shows is that it's really important still, even for the biggest, most established artists in the world,

her team considered it to be necessary to have that catalog up. How do you all feel about artists thinking about TikTok as they write and create their songs? I mean, I'm in favor of any, like, restriction that drives creativity, you know? I think if that's the... the only medium in which you consume music, like in like 30 second bursts or whatever, I think you're really narrowing your experience of an art form that has an incredible spectrum of like depth and richness. But I don't think it's a bad thing to use kind of short form video to drive your songwriting

in interesting ways. Yeah, I guess as someone who writes music, A prompt is not an unwelcome thing. And I guess I'm with you, Ben, where like, if you consider it a prompt and a creative challenge, that's interesting. If it becomes your norm and the only parameter in which you function, that's interesting. But I wonder if people kind of felt this way once the radio, when the radio was really very popular for listening to music, not that it's not now, but, you know, this idea.

of top 40 radio and your song can't be more than three or three and a half minutes, but, you know, he still had Pink Floyd doing whatever they wanted to do. And you still had people writing longer music that was getting consumed. Just had maybe a different audience or the same audience, but for a different time. Yeah, we love to say that, you know, the latest, like technological platform for art slash, you know, restriction that leads to new forms of art or new examples of an art form are the downfall of that art form. But I think history would suggest that, you know,

we're usually exaggerating. Totally. And it's always evolving. Like the pop music industry has always been necessarily reactive to like what they think listeners want. And that just changes all the time. that that's just part of pop music, I think, especially. Yep. And Alexandria thinks that actually, like, that was very defining of the past two years,

but she's already seeing a change where not the TikTok era of music isn't over, but the flavor is a little bit different. In, like, 2020, maybe early 2021, there was this whole rhetoric and idea about TikTok as representing the democratization of the music. music industry. Anybody can make it. Anyone can go viral and have a career now. But now we're in this later stage of TikTok four years later where the platform is very oversaturated with a lot of artists and it's a lot harder to break artists from the platform. And so artists and specifically a lot of the ones that I've interviewed for my research, they're trying to gauge how beneficial

using viral gimmicks is for their work. I think. I think instead a lot of them are shifting more to thinking about how to create sustainable fandom around their work. And maybe in the process, they're leveraging viral moments, but they're not constructing their whole career out of maybe just this one viral meme or something where they get so attached to it that that's it and there's no sustainability. So basically a lot of artists have found even if they do have like kind of a viral meme that doesn't necessarily translate into any other sort of success. It doesn't mean people are going to look up other songs in their catalog or necessarily go to concerts, et cetera. So they're shifting how they think

about that already. And I'll be so curious to hear how the, what is it, girl on couch? Yeah, how girl on couch the trajectory of her career as a musical artist, if this is the direction that she wants to go in and she has this record deal, but it's based on one kind of almost like spoken word poetry, one little micro wrap that she's put together

is this sort of one hit wonder or does she create a bunch of these that then get turned into songs? I don't know. It'll be interesting to see. Yeah, because it's also

really hard to predict or engineer what goes viral. The fact that she was a totally unknown creator with the day job who just threw that on TikTok with, I think at the time

she had like 2,000 followers. And it went huge. You just, you don't know what's going to hit a chord. And we're already seeing this with the specific remix that the label did release on streaming platforms. A lot of comments under her videos are like, we didn't want that remix. We wanted the Vandalux version from this other creator named Vandalux. And so that's really interesting because it kind of shows that sometimes the version that you're able to get the rights to. who might not even be the version that the people want.

The music industry doesn't always bet on the right course when it comes to internet culture. Yep, that makes sense. Grace, thank you very much for this journey through time and space and musical memory. Then I'm going to say that we should bring back Maya he, my ha, my ha, my ha, as the song of this summer.

Can we do that? Let's get it back. Somebody put that on TikTok quick. Yeah. Let's go. Do you guys remember the one that was very popular on TikTok for a minute that was like, do you know what I'm talking about? That's like all I can do.

And it was very popular for a long time. I have no idea what you're talking about. Do you know what I'm talking about? Are you like imitating a. synthesize you right now? There's a song that like I can't, I can't, I can't sing it anymore. And it was like, for like 20 minutes, it was like the song that was on all of the TikToks. And then it went away. So endless thread listeners, if you understand my ridiculous garbled impression. And there's like a bass line that kicks in. And it, oh man, if anyone can understand my gobbledygook impression.

No, no. Just sing that into Shazam. I'm sure you'll find you answer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Endless thread listeners, if you understand me, please save me. Because I... It's like a very weird voice, but it's funny. Are there any lyrics? Yes, but I can't remember them.

You're useless. Endless thread listeners, please save me from this ridiculousness. Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by me, Grace Tatter, and co-hosted by Amory Sievertson and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankelski. Endless Thread is a podcast where Ben sings a lot. So if you know the TikTok song, he is trying to sing, or if you have other favorite internet meme songs that we didn't get to talk about today, please email us at Endless Thread at WBUR.org.

We'll make a Spotify playlist with all of your suggestions, so you all can peruse them, and maybe we can get some new inspiration for Songs of the Summer. See you all next week.