About

Miranda Cosgrove Rock On refers to an image of actress Miranda Cosgrove as a child sticking up her index finger and pinkie making the "rock," "metal" or "devil horns" gesture with her hand. The photo has been used in myriad edits as an exploitable image macro or reaction image meme, usually as a way to poke fun at someone posing as having a punk rock or metal attitude.

Origin

The image of a young Miranda Cosgrove making the "rock on" gesture circulated online as early as 2008. A Livejournal blog post dated June 15th, 2008,^[1] may have hosted the image using a Tinypic embed, though it does not appear on the page as of July 2nd, 2024. The earliest known extant photo of the picture was made by the Twitter / X account @fetus_celebrity^[2] on November 6th, 2013, where it gained over 790 retweets and 670 likes in nearly 11 years (shown below).

Spread

Over the following decade, the image saw use in image macros in which people paired it with captions about feeling "punk rock" or rebellious over minor transgressions. For example, on October 30th, 2020, the Twitter account @headabovewter^[3] posted the photo with the caption, "9 year old me when avril lavigne said hell yeah I’m the motherfuckin' princess," gaining over 44,000 retweets and 170,000 likes in four years (shown below, left).

On March 19th, 2022, iFunny^[4] user SadSam posted an edit captioned "Me whenever I see the number 420" (shown below, right).

On July 1st, 2024, Wired published an interview with Cosgrove in which she gave some backstory to the image. She explained that she learned the gesture on the set of the 2003 comedy film School of Rock. The video gained over 100,000 views in one day and resulted in a resurgence of interest in the meme (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References