On June 14, 1787, Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered a strange addition into his catalogue of works: “A Musical Joke”, designed, with its discordant melodies and clumsy rhythms, to mock the work of incompetent composers. In many ways, it was an early example of meme music – a sound or genre less concerned with the aesthetic quality of its music than with its satire of social norms.
These sorts of musical in-jokes have found a particularly receptive home on the internet, where, in some cases, memes have codified into whole microgenres. The most recent was UK Poo – a meme genre coined to mock low-effort British rap music. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The last three decades have seen a proliferation of niche, internet-native microgenres – in some cases, these genres have even transcended their satirical roots and become hotspots for musical innovation in and of themselves.
Below, from wacky penis music and fashwave to pirate metal and shitgaze, we explore five of the strangest and most prolific meme genres.
SHITGAZE
Emerging just as internet culture was starting to take root in the early 2000s, shitgaze is an extremely distorted, patently low-effort hybridisation of slacker rock and noise rock. The name owes itself to a joke cracked by bassist Kevin DeBroux while listening to Ohio rock band Psychedelic Horseshit in 2005 – a band he would later join. “We were sitting around stoned listening to the Psychedelic Horseshit album, and I knew Matt [Whitehurst] was into ['90s UK] shoegaze stuff,” DeBroux recalled in a 2008 interview of hanging out with Psychedelic Horseshit’s founder. “I'm like, ‘Man, this isn’t shoegaze; this is shitgaze’.”
From there, Whitehurst used the term on MySpace and the music press ran with it – musing on the genre’s “no-fi” recording quality and clipping sounds. Soon, fellow Ohio band Times New Viking had been labelled shitgaze, too, and other West Coast punk bands began identifying with the label. By the early 2010s, the term had fallen out of use (likely because it relied more on impact than any true depiction of a music scene), but, strangely enough, many of shitgaze’s musical experiments are central to underground music today – namely, carefully clipping recordings and vocals submerged in distortion (*cough* fakemink *cough*).
WACKY PENIS MUSIC
This one sits deep in the annals of internet history, first being coined in a now-deleted Tumblr post in 2018. The post had no link attached, just the words “penis music”, but this line alone was compelling enough to speak the genre into existence. Very soon, already-existing tracks had been retroactively brought under the wacky penis umbrella – most notably, Jackal Queenston’s 2012 cartoonish drum‘n’bass track “Rubber Band”.
While the term was initially a joke that often accompanied meme edits of 2010 animated film Megamind, it has since developed its own musical hallmarks – namely cartoon soundbytes, a driving rhythm and a memeworthy quality. My personal favourite is this inclusion in the soundtrack to 2006 beat ‘em up game God Hand, which features nonsensical, Elvis Presley-sounding vocals over an electrofunk beat.
PIRATE METAL
Picture Captain Jack Sparrow with a keytar (keyboard-guitar) and you’re basically there. Bizarrely, pirate metal is probably the most established meme genre on this list, with a wealth of pirate-cosplaying bands with names like Alestorm, Swashbuckle and Rumahoy proliferating in the 21st century, singing about drinking ale and “living a pirate’s life” over metal-lite instrumentation.
The actual roots of pirate metal, however, stretch back to the early 1980s – where, separately, Australian band Black Jack and Germany’s Running Wild both grafted sea shanty melodies and piratic themes onto metal music’s already maximalist and fantastical aesthetics. In a broader sense, then, the surprising synergy between these mediums speaks to the escapist nature of metal music itself – elsewhere represented by pirate metal’s closest relative, folk metal. While, from the outside, metal’s often dystopian band names and heavy sonics might sound intimidating, they actually represent something a little more theatrical and playful.
JUCHEWAVE
“Hello western listener! This album is part of a program initiated by Myself to promote awareness of the true North Korea.” Supposedly written by the First Lady of the DPRK, Ri Sol-ju, this is the text that accompanies the magnum opus of the juchewave genre: Juchewave by the North Korean Ministry of Vaporwave. Combining the surreal, floaty aesthetics of vaporwave with the propaganda music and imagery of North Korea, juchewave takes its name from ‘juche’, Korean for ‘self-reliance’ and the official state ideology of North Korea.
Of course, juchewave isn’t actually produced by any official North Korean government ministry – but it is one of many meme subgenres of vaporwave music, itself an internet-native microgenre filled with nostalgic, reverb-heavy samples and satirical imagery. Elsewhere in the vaporwave family tree, meme music aficionados will find the likes of fashwave, dedicated to far-right and fascist iconography, and the slightly more family-friendly simpsonwave, which submerges episodes of The Simpsons in a purple, psychedelic haze and sets them to vaguely melancholic, lo-fi beats.
SOUNDCLOWN / DARIACORE
Buckle up, because this one runs deep. In 2021, Jane Remover released the album Dariacore under the alias Leroy. The album was strangely compelling, featuring visuals based around niche 90s animated series Daria, and breakneck mashups of old pop tracks, drum‘n’bass breaks, jersey club beats and more. Dariacore is widely credited with creating its own internet microgenre of the same name, as well as sparking regional offshoots like Japan’s even more chaotic hyperflip scene – but it also marked the maturation of a long lineage of meme music.
After all, Jane Remover herself has since described the genre as “a joke that’s gone on too far” and explained that the project was influenced by the mid-2010s meme genre, SoundClown – a hyper-satirical, SoundCloud-based dance movement defined by its endless pop music mashups. That genre is aptly summed up by one internet user as “humanity’s end credits”: Eminem lyrics collapsing into dubstep bass drops, anime OSTs colliding with The Simpsons theme song, and so on.
But SoundClown, too, is a derivative genre – influenced by the likes of YTPMV (aka YouTube Poop Music Videos, which creates collages and edits of various YouTube clips – like this Breaking Bad edit), and, more distantly, plunderphonics – a genre coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 defined by its endless resampling of recognisable musical works.
Together, then, while Jane Remover’s dariacore innovation might have proven particularly influential in recent years, it also speaks directly to the heart of music-making in the digital age, in which distant references and recordings are Frankenstein’d together. In many ways, it’s the logical conclusion of meme music, in which the chaos of the internet itself becomes the genre.