Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

Almost ever audio/video meme seems to have an U.N. Owen was her? remix. I mean, is it a meme or not. If it is, I'd be happy to write the article.

I have an entire youtube play lists of just remixes. Some of the better ones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvcFX4OkD0M&feature=channel_page
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHoUcR-Njps&feature=channel_page
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2tGaCo7cgc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxGXKH24zt8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hogdwGYaEJc&feature=related
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa7eiyx6ccQ&annotation_id=annotation_701871&feature=iv

A lot more are out there, feel free to post them. But just the amount of remixes with that song are amazing.

It's mentioned a lot in lots of entries alreay, but I'd say it probably deserves an entry of its own.

To play the devil's advocate, can a popular song really be considered a meme? Wouldn't that open the proverbial floodgates? Promoting U.N. Owen was her to meme status would be like giving a signal to make an entry for every song thats ever reached a critical mass of remixs on the interwebs towards getting itself an entry.

Now, to counter my counterpoint:
It's a good song from an insane game. :D

I see wat you're saying, but I think the floodgates busted off their hinges on what people consider memes a while back.

But you may have a point. I don't know if I've fully grasped the impact of Touhou in Japan. We might think of creating a big master entry to bring together all of the Touhou-related stuff.

I agree with both of you.
My reasoning is with out all IOSYS and COOL.&CREATE remixes of that song, there are still hundreds of them.

So just gimme the answer and I'll have an entry by Tuesday. (YAY summer break and noooo camp this year~)

In that case, Touhou as a whole should have an entry?

I think that might be a possible solution for these video-game related memes. For instance, Team Fortress 2 has a huge user-base, lots of jokes taken right from the game and treated as if they were memes. I don't personally see stuff like that as an internet meme, but obviously we get plenty of requests for so-called memes that are simply video-game references and fan-art. These things blend together with other internet memes, but if each was given it's own entry there would be too many catch-phrases and references to cover coherently.
While I'm not in favor of referring to a video game as a meme, I am leaning toward the idea of creating "master-meme" entries for video games that have lots of memetic-material, like Portal, TF2, and I'm thinking possibly Touhou.
One thing is for sure: no matter how we address things like video game and movie fandom we'll end up opening unforseen floodgates.

U.N. Owen was her is definitely a song that is used a lot with "remixes". Though there are plenty of other songs that have been used in the same way such as "Red Zone" and songs from Kirby games such as "Sky High" and "Sand Canyon". I would go as far to say that the songs I just mentioned have about the same usage rate for these "remixes".

What I'm trying to get at here is that "U.N. Owen is her?" is just part of a bigger sort of meme here. The "Remix" meme if you will. Though I don't know if I would exactly call these sort of things "remixes" since a remix tends to be, in my opinion, when someone take a song or a clip of a song and does something to change it into sounding different then the original source. While with remixes that use something like "U.N. Owen was her?" just take the song and overlay it with a video that is edited in such a way that makes it sound like the video is playing along with the music. It a "Video/Music Mash-up" in a way.

The term "remix" has been used very loosely but for the sake of convenience. Much in the same way that we haven't yet been very specific about what does and does not constitute an Internet Meme. But I'm okay with that. Although we want to be as clear and concise about explanations as we possibly can, we also don't want to get too lost in the semantics.

So I'm cool with referring to UN Owen video mashups as remixes, or even those TF2 Bonk videos as remixes. Personally I'm a fan of relating the whole concept of internet memes with a larger user-generated participatory remix culture. I know that sounds vague but that works to its advantage by making the concept nearly all-inclusive.

You could fault me for using such a strung-together umbrella statement, but it allows me to attempt to give attention to all entries, regardless of whether or not they immediately strike me as an Internet Meme or not.

hmmm…. I think we are getting a couple remixes (inclding a 70-30 techno remix) on newgrounds. 2 so far. just type U.N. owen in the audio portal search box