Day 16: This is Why We Can't Have Nice Memes

Try, for a moment, to send your mind back to the year 2008. It was a simpler (and honestly much worse) time. Memes were still in their infancy, and holy shit did they suck. Take a look at some of these "gems".

hAHa wOW tHAt'S SO FUNNY

haha yes Chuck Norris jokes very good

okay this is actually starting to kill me let's stop

Alright that's fucking enough of that. See, we made it through together, and we're better for it! Now, these memes are horrible, but the worst memes are those that go full-on mainstream and infect every corner of your aunt's Facebook page. I could elaborate, but I think the next picture speaks for itself.

Thanks Cheryl

So what does any of this have to do with Taylor Swift? For the two of you still reading, I went down this rabbit hole because of one of the songs on Taylor's 2017 album Reputation. The song in question is, of course, This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. I actually don't have all that much to say about the quality of the song, because every time I listen to it my thoughts inevitably drift off to meme culture. even more than they usually do.

For those of you who don't know, the phrase "this is why we can't have nice things" is a very old meme, dating further back than almost any other similar phrase on the internet. Specifically, it was most commonly used when internet discourse devolved to a point where any semblance of civilized communication has gone straight out the window. So yeah, it was used all the time.

Taylor definitely knew about the existence of this meme before her song was published. An artist as large as her doesn't just ship a song this big without at least googling the title. So what's the big deal? An artist makes a reference to an internet saying in her new album, what's wrong with that. Well, this is where things get a little more interesting, because "this is why we can't have nice things" arguably isn't even an internet reference anymore. 

I don't say this because it's "mainstream" now, I think that's a pretty shitty argument on it's own, and notably Taylor's use of the phrase is 100% appropriate. She gave a friend a second chance and extended invitations to her fancy parties, but had to shut it down because her "friend" wouldn't stop talking shit. I say that the phrase isn't an internet reference anymore because strictly from a numbers perspective it legitimately isn't. Here's the chart of google searches for "this is why we can't have nice thing". 

When Reputation was released the peak searches peaked at 10 times the highest it had ever been in the past, and about 100 times higher than it was just before the album's release. The simple fact is that the difference in scale is too massive to overstate. "This is why we can't have nice things" isn't an internet meme anymore, it's a Taylor Swift song that was inspired by a dead internet meme. If you say it in public people are more likely to identify it as a Taylor Swift song than anything else.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I don't think this is bad, it's just a fact. Culture transforms over time; resisting this is always a fruitless battle. I don't think Taylor or her fans have done anything wrong, I just miss my awful memes sometimes. 

gotta love that watermark

See you tomorrow,

-C