About

/mu/ is a forum dedicated to discussing music on the imageboard 4chan. Since its creation, it has become one of the largest music discussion boards on the English-speaking Internet.

History

In 2004, the /mu/ board was introduced on 4chan^[1], along with several other additional new forums including /k/ (weapons), /o/ (automobile) and /v/ (video games). On January 1st, 2013, a wiki^[2] site dedicated to /mu/ was created.

Highlights

Recurring topics on the /mu/ board include share threads, where users post links to albums they recommend; chart threads, which are used to show what albums a user has been listening to, often sharing via Last.fm; and threads for showing off user’s pages on Bandcamp and Soundcloud; alongside other, more specific general threads around themes such as classical music, music production and Korean pop music.^[3] /mu/ is sometimes notoriously known for praising only certain artists that have become dubbed as “/mu/-core”.

/mu/-core

/mu/ is known for its cultivating online fandom around select recording artists from a wide range of musical genres, including Radiohead, Death Grips, King Crimson, Animal Collective, Grimes, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Kanye West, Varg Vikernes and Lil B.

The board's users have generated numerous charts of /mu/-core, divided by genre and artist, allowing newcomers to listen to essential albums. Various amounts of these charts can be found on both the /mu/ Wikia^[4] and the website /mu/essentials.^[5] Several bands and albums which have grown to icon status on the board are referred to as /mu/-core.

Related Artists & Albums

Death Grips Death Grips was an experimental hip-hop group from Sacramento, California. As the notability of the group amongst the board grew, several of the band's albums, such as Exmilitary and The Money Store, became considered essential listening material. Because of their popularity, several board in-jokes have been linked to the group, such as Jenny Death When.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea In The Aeroplane Over the Sea is an album by the indie rock group Neutral Milk Hotel. The album is an earlier example of a "/mu/-core" album and has become heavily associated with the board, with the album's cover gaining significant notability and generating numerous parodies.

Satirical Hip Hop / Meme Rap

Satirical Hip Hop (often referred to as Ironic rap or Meme Rap) refers to a sub genre of hip hop that is created with the intention of becoming viral, normally as a joke and/or a parody of prominent genres such as Gangsta rap and trap music. The satirical nature of an ironic rap song is often intentionally left out of its title, cover image, and description, in order to catch listeners by surprise. Meme rap typically features lo-fi cloudy production, simplistic music videos, lazy rhymes, and intentionally stereotypical lyrics, with humor as the goal.

Traffic

While there is no publicly available analytics data that pertain to the usage of the board, the daily user statistics can be found at Catalog.neet.tv.^[6] In addition, there are at least two websites devoted to hosting archived /mu/ discussion threads, Rebecca Black Tech^[7] and rbt.asia,^[8] both of which are named after the 2011 internet pop sensation Rebecca Black.

Related Memes

Le Wrong Generation

Le Wrong Generation is a sarcastic term applied to examples of people asserting that music of the past is objectively superior to music of the present, often mocking the perceived pretentiousness and narrow-mindedness of such beliefs. It is often heavily associated with appreciation for controversial popular artists such as Kanye West.

Today I Will Listen To Some X

Today I Will Listen to Some X is a series of four-pane comics centered around a stick-figure character who reacts in a certain way after listening to a song by band (X). Yet another spin-off of the Rageguy comics, this series illustrates a wide range of audience receptions (depending on each illustrator’s music preferences), as well as humorous observations on various subcultures and dress codes commonly associated with certain bands and genres.

That Girl Is So Cute, I Wonder What She's Listening To…

That Girl Is So Cute, I Wonder What She's Listening To… is an exploitable comic depicting a young girl on the bus listening to music, while a man wonders what she is listening to from a distance. The comic usually ends with crude or violent lyrics. The comic gained notoriety on 4chan's /mu/ board as an exploitable comic, in which the poster replaces the final panel with a different set of lyrics, very often with lyrics from the band Death Grips.

Anthony Fantano

Anthony Fantano is a music critic known mostly from his YouTube channel The Needle Drop. His videos have gained a popular following on the board. In return, Fantano has acknowledged his following there on several occasions.

Piero Scaruffi Beatles Copypasta

The Piero Scaruffi Beatles Copypasta is a /mu/-specific copypasta taken from a paper written about the seminal rock group The Beatles written by Italian music critic Piero Scaruffi. The copypasta is infamous for its pretentious writing style and controversial opinion.

Caveman SpongeBob

Caveman SpongeBob is a reaction image primarily used on /mu/ to show disgust towards a certain aspect of music. The image is taken from the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "SB-129", in which the character Squidward travels back in time and encounter's SpongeBob's ancient ancestor Primitive Sponge.^[9] The image is usually used in conjunction with greentext comments to point out musical pet peeves such as ">band has two drummers".

Search Interest

External References