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I believe I first heard about it from Waxy.org's links feed. The link from Waxy sent me over to Buzzfeed, which was apparently where it began gestating. Shortly thereafter, I saw it on Best Week Ever (the site, not the TV show), The AV Club, and Metafilter. Now there's a Flickr group dedicated to it, and it seems that even people who would consider themselves staunchly meme averse are doing it.
What is it? Why, it's the 'Wikipedia Names Your Band' meme, kids!
Indeed, over the past six days this meme has spread like wildfire... or a plague... or a festering rash... throughout all of internetland (incidentally, why isn't there a positive, pleasant metaphor for something spreading? "It spread like a galloping herd of adorable puppies!"? Eh, nevermind). In fact, just this morning I opened my email inbox to find that my friend Whit had tagged me for this very same meme on Facebook. And when something hits Facebook -- final resting place and repository of all the internet's memeage -- you know its finally reached critical mass, the point just before it jumps the shark and goes from Fun Timewaster to Annoyingly Relentless Irritant and OMG PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.
I wondered how my friend had come to meet this meme and accept it into his heart. So, over IM this morning, I asked:
So that was helpful.
As for me doing it, I was a bit late to the game, honestly -- late in viral internet meme terms, at least. The originating Buzzfeed post went live on February 20th. I first heard of it the following day, on the 21st. And then, because I'm an overachiever (read: obsessive/compulsive crackhead), I spent most of the 22nd making TEN album covers which I finally posted to my blog on the 23rd. Here is one of those masterpieces:
I like to think of Thulo Dhading and their music as a sort of Devo meets Ted Nugent type of musical experience. I like to think that.
So what makes this meme so compelling and infectious that it spread so quickly and with such deep and broad a reach into the farthest corners of the interwebs? I'm not entirely sure, but I do have a two-part theory, which is that this meme allows the person doing it to be original and creative (within Album Cover conventions, by way of design, typography, etc.) without risking anything (you've been provided with the essential components for the album cover and have nothing at stake because you didn't create any of it yourself from scratch). Oh and did I also mention the covers are often seriously funny and it's genuinely fun to do? So I guess that makes it a THREE-part theory then. Hrmm.
Okay, okay, now it's YOUR TURN to participate! Make your own album cover and post the link in comments here. Ready, set... oh wait, here are the rules:
- Go to “Wikipedia.” Hit “random” and the first article you get is the name of your band.
- Then go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
- Then, go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days” and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
- Use Photoshop or some other image editor (I used the free online image editor Picnik) to add text & spiffify.
- Post a link to your band's album cover here! DO IT DO IT DO IT!!!
. . . . .
Tracey, aka Sweetney, writes about Pop Culture & Entertainment at MamaPop, and is Thulo Dhading's number one fan.
