orestian:

mostmodernist:

orestian:

mostmodernist:

i don’t get the “you would not believe ________ if ten million ________” meme

its the owl city song about ten million fireflies… the appeal is reading the different and amusing words and hearing the man sing them soothingly in your mind’s ears

I don’t think I know the song off the top of my head, but in any case, its not a new one right? why the meme all of a sudden

I think someone made a standard “title/post discrepancy” format joke a little while ago that was just “you would not believe your eyes/[an amusing line that replaced “if ten million fireflies”, and kept the original rhyme scheme]“. since the owl city guy is autistic and his music is appealing to people who have similar sensory processing differences-from-the-norm he’s almost universally Known to brainweird tumblr, and since that’s one of the most popular songs he’s released it was a tune pretty much everyone interacting with the original joke was familiar with. part of the humor of the meme is the mental echolalia aspect (hearing the tune just from reading the lyrics, which is one of those sensory processing things), so the initial riffs on the ur-meme were simply things that sounded funny if you mentally replaced them in the lyrics, but it quickly evolved into finding ways to maintain the rhythm and meter of the original snippet while replacing almost all of the words. at the moment, communal meme saturation has reached the point that the only words required to make it a recognizable meme remix are the “you would not” at the beginning of the thing, but someone will probably find a way to maintain the reference frame while completely replacing the content sometime soon. starting off a text-based singalong by posting the first line and waiting for someone who knows what song it is to join in with the second is a somewhat esoteric behavioral meme that has its origins in jamming the fuck out and shitposting wildly, but with the bonus of unknown friends. to sing out into the void and have another sing back is a simple and timeless pleasure. this is a variation on that – we are not singing the next line of the song, but the same line, over and over, in as many variations as possible, keeping only the musical aspect, since the original memer found that it was amusing and interesting to do so.