Looking for a man in finance and finding a record deal: How memes become pop hits

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.

Show notes:

This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Grace: Ben and Amory, happy almost summer.

Ben: Yeah. How are you?

Grace: I'm great. I'm jumping the gun a little bit. It's not really summer until a) June 21, and b) We've all agreed on at least a few contenders for the song of the summer. Do you guys have any possibilities?

Ben: Feel good song of the summer?

Grace: Yeah, we gotta have one.

Ben: I default, Grace, to the Queens of the Stone Age song, “Feel Good Hit of the Summer.”

Amory: Hmm.

Ben: Yeah, and it goes, uh, Nicotine, Vicodin, Valium – oh shhhh, I can't remember how it goes. It's a drug song. (singing) Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, Marijuana, Ecstasy, and Alcohol. Co-co-co-co cocaine. But that's not really a feel good hit of the summer, that's just a drug song from a stoner rock band. Anyway, please, go on.

Grace: 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?”

Ben: Yes.

Grace: Everyone probably knows what this is.

Ben: Yep, I know Girl on the Couch. Yeah.

Amory: I do not know.

Grace: Well, I'm going to send you a clip of this video. Here we go.

[I'm looking for a man in finance, with a 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 a, looking for a, looking for a, looking for a, finance, trust fund, six five, blue eyes.]

Ben: Is this the original?

Grace: Yeah. That's the original.

Ben: Okay, interesting, because I've seen many of the iterations, but I didn't know what the original was.

Amory: Yeah, I think I saw a tweet that referenced this, but I did not know what they were talking about.

Grace: Can you read the caption of the video for me?

Ben: “Can someone make this into an actual song, please, just for funsies?”

Grace: Okay, so the internet truly delivered on this. There were remixes on remixes.

(Sad Alex remix)

Grace: A million variations.

[You're looking for a guy in medicine. PhD. Must be Indian.]

[Freelance, 5'6 tattoos, Bushwick. ]

Grace: And just weeks after posting this TikTok, Girl on Couch got a record deal for this.

Ben: I mean, Amory is gonna be madder about this than me, as a, like, 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.

Grace: It's true, yeah, but apparently that's enough these days. So, the label Capital Polydor Virgin Germany signed her.

Ben: That's a lot of record labels in one –

Grace: There's clearly a lot of mergers and acquisitions in that name.

Ben: Yes, clearly.

Grace: And they’ve released an official version, a remix with the DJ duo, Billen Ted. That came out in May. And then on June 7, they released and another remix with David Guetta.

("Man in Finance (G6 Trust Fund)" by Girl On Couch and Billen Ted)

Grace: Girl on Couch – her real name is Megan Boni – also got a publishing deal with Universal Music, so now, she’ll get royalties whenever her …song…song-like combination of words? – is sampled.

Grace: 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 and 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.

Ben: I’m so ready for this one.

Amory: Yes.

Ben: I'm in.

Grace: Okay, so if you had to guess when the first kind of mainstream meme pop music crossover was, how far back would you go?

Amory: Did any of those memes go back further than 2006? I'm gonna say 2006. It's probably much earlier than that, but let's say 2006.

Ben: I'm going to say like 2000.

Grace: 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 were close, Ben. To … the hamster dance.

("The Hamster Dance" plays)

Amory: Awww.

Ben: Nice.

Amory: Oh, still slaps. I love it.

Ben: What's messed up is this is one I don't know.

Amory: What?

Ben: Yeah.

Amory: Ben Brock Johnson doesn't know the hamster dance.

Ben: I don’t think I know the hamster dance, guys. I'm sorry.

Amory: Oh man. That's delicious.

Grace: I wouldn't have known it was called the hamster dance, 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.

Amory: Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, What kind of circus clown show P. E. class was this?

Grace: 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.

Amory: That was just your P. E. teacher, like, making fun of you guys. Being like, yeah, yeah, no, it's good for you. Go.

Grace: 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 Arrieta helped me excavate this deep memory. She's a PhD candidate at USC's Annenberg School of Communications in Los Angeles.

Alexandria: I study the relationship between popular music and internet memes, as well as music creator platforms.

Grace: And she told me that the Hamster Dance was actually one of the earliest internet memes, just in general.

Alexandria: It was on this web hosting service called GeoCities, 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.

("Whistle-Stop" from Robin Hood plays)

Grace: 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.

Amory: 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.

Ben: It's like also very basic. It's very basic, like, early internet animation. Right? Like, you would see these all over Geocities sites, right? They're almost like clip art, but they move.

Amory: But honestly, I mean, I think the humor in it is more in the 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 –

Ben: Woo!

Amory: Yes, hamsters!

Ben: Ha ha ha.

Grace: It's a catchy beat, which I guess is why a bunch of EDM groups started doing remixes of this.

Alexandria: One group was called the Cuban Boys out of the UK. Their version charted in the UK, and then another group was the Boomtang Boys based in Canada, and that also charted in Canada and became a really big hit at Radio Disney.

Grace: Which is possibly why Ben, this EDM, the EDM version, eluded you. Maybe you were past Radio Disney at that point in your life.

Ben: Yes, admittedly I was.

Grace: Okay, 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.

("Dragostea Din Tei" by O-Zone plays)

Grace: Do you all remember this?

Amory: I loved this song!

Ben: Yeah, this is the guy I'm remembering. The guy sitting at his computer. Yeah.

Amory: I loved this so much. Yes.

Grace: Yeah, I think that anyone who is like at all sentient at this time will know this video exactly. It's this young man from New Jersey, Gary Brolsma, lip syncing to a pop song released the previous year by a Moldovan pop group called O-Zone. Do you remember where you first saw this video?

Ben: Oh man. I want to say like, Ebaum's World or something would be my guess.

Amory: I've actually never seen this video. I know the song.

Ben: You’ve never seen this? Oh man, it's so enjoyable.

Amory: No, I was a gymnastics coach at this time of my life. And 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, I do not know the video.

Ben: Ah, love this.

Grace: 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 Newgrounds, which I think was like a gaming website.

Ben: OK.

Grace: 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.

Ben: This is proof positive that like, sometimes a huge hit can just be like the weirdest frickin’ thing of somebody just like being themselves in like a very weird way, and everybody somehow relating to that, which I love.

Grace: It was a more innocent time, and I think something else that really shows how much slower culture metabolized stuff back the else n is the fact that this meme didn't make its top 40 debut in the U.S. until 2008 when it was sampled in the TI song, “Live Your Life,” featuring Rihanna or Riahnna. However you want to say it.

("Live Your Life" by T.I., featuring Rihanna)

Amory: Was anything from the video carried over into the video for this song, or is it just, are we just talking like sampling at this point?

Grace: 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.

Ben: That makes sense. This to me is like an early example of the like internet pop star feedback loop right? Like whatever RiRi touches turns to gold as we all know, and maybe TI, too. but like, they basically took this thing that was very popular on the internet and turned it into a hook which then further exploded its popularity I would imagine, right?

Grace: 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 it people think that that would resonate or would it seem like, oh that’s just old news?

Amory: Well, I, I don't know, I mean, I, having not seen the video, I already sound so old saying that. Having 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 Rihahnna, or Rihanna, or however you want to pronounce it. She also brought back, like, “Mamase Mamasa Mamakusa” from Michael Jackson from 1986 is when Thriller became really popular. Maybe it was like 1985 that the album came out. I mean, I, to me, it's just like resurrecting great, melodies and hooks. What was that one that's like, (singing) "Oh, you spin my head right round, right round." Who brought that back? Someone brought that back. Was it also Rihanna?

Grace: Well, that was in the FloRida song, right?

Amory: FloRida. 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.

Grace: No, that's a good point. In this case, the producer of "Live Your Life" cited Gary’s video specifically as his inspiration for using the Moldovan pop song as the hook. But you’re right, it is a bop, and maybe he would’ve still 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 a pop song ends, or vice versa, and that only gets more tangled as we move toward the present day…which we will do, in a minute, after a break.

(Sponsor break)

Grace: OK. 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.

("Old Town Road," Lil Nas X)

Ben: That's my, that's my favorite one so far, I would say.

Grace: Yeah, it was the song of that summer of 2019. Absolutely.

Ben: Connected also to a video game that came out around the same time, like when we talked about (singing) "My, he, my, ha" – when we talked about that one. That one it took, the rappers and the musicians, the singers, whatever we would call Rihanna and T.I., 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 Redemption 2, and like very quickly turns it into a massive hit, right?

Grace: Yeah, he posted this in actually late 2018, but by April 2019, this song is absolutely everywhere. Here is pop music researcher Alexandria Arrieta again.

Alexandria: I really believe that that song in particular helped to usher 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.

Grace: So Lil Nas X was already big on Twitter before he posted the song. He knew the ins and outs of social media from running a Nicki Minaj stan account, so he was thinking about social media very intentionally.

Alexandria: 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 audio-visual pairings too. And so him starting these early kind of memes and play around the song where people were putting images and videos of horseriding with, the song helped to propel it

Grace: I'm going to send you all a video of some of the early TikToks that were with this.

Amory: So there's, there's, uh, 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.

("Old Town Road" verse: I got the horses in the back/horse tack is attached...)

Grace: So this is huge on Tik Tok, which is still pretty nascent then back in 2019. This kind of trend, this audio-visual pairing, where there’s like a jump cut when the beat drops, goes back a little farther. There was “The Harlem Shake” meme on YouTube in 2013, where there’d be like one person in a room dancing, usually there wearing a mask, or a weird costume, and then the beat would drop and everyone in the room would be dancing. That song charted that year, in 2013, in part because Billboard started to include video streams in their calculations. So figuring out this ‘audio visual’ pairing is really key, and Little Nas X does that. He signs with Columbia Records and releases a version with Billy Ray Cyrus.

Ben: Of course.

Grace: There was another viral TikTok dance for THAT version. And to this day it is the longest running song on the Billboard Top 100 ever.

Ben: Whoa. That is wild to me. But also, not necessarily undeserved.

Grace: Okay, so we've been talking about examples of things that start out as memes and then end up being big songs, but Lil Nas X 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.

Ben: Oh yeah.

Alexandria: 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.

Grace: How do you all feel about artists thinking about TikTok as they write and create their songs?

Ben: I mean, I'm in favor of any restriction that drives creativity, you know? I think if that's 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.

Amory: Yeah I guess as, 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, uh, parameter in which you function, that's but I wonder if people kind of, I wonder if people kind of felt this way, once the, you know, 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, you still had Pink Floyd doing whatever they wanted to do and, uh, you still had people writing longer music that was getting consumed, just had maybe a, a different audience or the same audience, but for a different time.

Ben: 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.

Grace: 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, but that's just part of pop music, I think especially, um, and Alexandria thinks that actually like that was very defining of the past two years, but she's already seeing a change. We're not, the TikTok era of music isn't over, but, the flavor is a little bit different.

Alexandria: In 2020, maybe early 2021, there was this whole rhetoric and idea about TikTok as representing the democratization of the 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 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.

Grace: 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, etc. So they're shifting how they think about that already

Amory: And I'll be so curious to hear how, the, what is it, Girl on Couch? 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, um, um, almost like spoken word poetry. One little, one little micro rap that she's put together. Is this a, a 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.

Grace: Yeah, because it's also really hard to predict or engineer what goes viral. Unlike the fact that she was a totally unknown creator with a 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 --

Alexandria: 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, might not even be the version that the people want

Grace: The music industry doesn't always bet on the right horse when it comes to internet culture.

Amory: Yep. That makes sense.

Ben: Grace, thank you very much for this, this journey through time and space and, and musical memery.

Amory: And I'm going to say that we should bring back (singing) Ma ya hee my ya ha, my ya hee, my hahaha, as the song of this summer. Can we do that

Ben: Yeah. Let's get it back. Somebody put that on TikTok quick.

Amory: Yeah!

Ben: Do you guys remember the one that was like very popular on TikTok for a minute that was like (singing). Do you know what I'm talking about? That's like all I can do and it was very popular for a long time. (sings). Do you know what I'm talking about?

Amory: Are you like imitating a synthesizer right now

Ben: I can't sing it anymore and it was like it for 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 oh man if anyone can understand my gobbledygook impression –

Amory: No, just sing that into Shazam, Ben. I’m sure you’ll find your answer.
Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Endless Thread listeners, if you understand me, please save me. Because (sings). It's like a very weird voice, but it's funny.

Amory: Are there any lyrics?

Ben: Yes, but I can't remember them.

Amory: You're useless.

Ben: Endless Thread listeners, please save me from this ridiculousness.

Grace: Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by me, Grace Tatter and co-hosted by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Endless Thread is a podcast where Ben sings a lot. If you know the TikTok song he was 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 endlessthread at wbur.org. We’ll make a Spotify playlist with all of your suggestions, so you can peruse them, and maybe we get inspiration for songs of the summer. See you all next week!