About

Bad to The Bone is a song by the rock group George Thorogood & The Destroyers that originally came out in 1982. The song's distinct opening guitar riff began seeing use in video memes as a sound effect around 2016, primarily on YouTube, with remixes popping up in following years on other platforms like TikTok.

Origin

On August 20th, 2016, the YouTube account PPLEKN^[1] uploaded a video titled "My Movie" to the platform, with the video acting as a presentation in PowerPoint that switches between slides of various cars with skull emblems or modifications done to them while the opening to the song "Bad to the Bone" plays offbeat, earning 300,000 views in seven years (shown below).

After several years, the opening guitar riff was added to additional memes for humorous effect in a YouTube 1 Hour Of Silence Broken By Sound Effects meme format, uploaded on August 8th, 2021, by the channel ALT^[2], in which an hour of silence plays but every few minutes the opening riff goes off without warning and only lasts a few seconds (shown below).

Spread

The "Bad to the Bone" guitar riff then became a prevalent sound on TikTok in late 2020, where it became associated with an image of a dog smiling while looking into the camera. The TikTok was originally uploaded by the account itz_jose7^[3] on September 23rd, 2020, earning 151,000 likes in two years (shown below).

On January 12th, 2022, the YouTube channel proshitposting^[4] uploaded a video of an older car with over a hundred skulls attached to it, playing a modified version of the guitar riff on top of itself in an antithesis to all previous incarnations of the meme before it (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References