About

Eddie Munson's "This Is Music!" is a line in the eighth episode of the fourth season of Stranger Things that is said by the character Eddie Munson (portrayed by Joseph Quinn) in a panic while the characters were looking for traditional pop music among his metal cassette tapes. Shortly after part two of the season's premiere, released July 1st, 2022, audio of the scene was used in a TikTok trend where users included humorous music selections as their choice of "this is music" in skits. Simultaneously, stills of the scene were turned into an exploitable image macro where users replaced the artwork on Eddie's cassette via Photoshop.

Origin

On July 1st, 2022, part two of Stranger Things 4 was released on Netflix. In the context of the scene, the characters in the show were scrambling throughout various metal cassette tapes while trying to find something recognizable as pop music, believing that it was the solution to their problem. Eddie Munson, the stereotypical metalhead who's room they were in, loudly proclaimed that the cassette tapes were in fact music, despite them not being what the rest of the cast would consider to be "music." The scene was uploaded to YouTube on July 3rd, 2022, by the channel Kane Will,^[1] where it gained 26,000 views in three days (shown below).

A day after the episode aired on July 2nd, 2022, TikToker mrvl.lu^[2] uploaded a TikTok in which they recreated the scene using the audio from Stranger Things with their punchline being that the Monsters Inc theme song "is music," earning them 138,000 likes in four days and creating the audio page that would be used over 63,000 times in subsequent days (shown below).

Spread

On July 3rd, 2022, TikToker Andrewsgrotto^[3] made another example using the audio from mrvl.lu, this time with him supplying a physical CD for each of the given examples of "music," and the punchline being all of the released One Direction music on CDs as his example of "this is music," which earned him over 722,000 likes in three days (shown below, left). On July 5th, TikToker waterstonenottingham^[4] then used the audio sample to instead refer to books vs. music, with the punchline being that Percy Jackson should be held at the same level of classic as Emerson and Dickens, earning over 220,000 likes in one day (shown below, right).

Aside from the TikTok trend using the scene as a meme, an exploitable version also appeared online around the same time in early July 2022 where users would replace the album artwork on Eddie's cassette tape with various music. For example, on July 3rd, the Facebook^[5] page Scene Dude uploaded one with a Blink-182 album photoshopped in, receiving over 4,000 reactions and 2,300 shares in three days. On July 4th, Redditor alienembry0 posted another example with a Bathory cover on the tape to /r/metalmemes,^[6] receiving over 1,000 upvotes in two days (seen below).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References