My Grandfather Told Me About Elvis

About

My Grandfather Told Me About Elvis is a three-panel exploitable series comparing three generations of musical artists. In the first panel, the text reads, "My grandfather told me about Elvis," next to a picture of late recording artist Elvis Presley. The second panel reads, "My father told me about Michael Jackson," next to a photo of singer Michael Jackson. Memers use the final panel to add a musician of their own liking or adding an ironic or absurd cultural figure.

Origin

On September 21st, 2020, the Instagram ^[1] account @juiwrld999 published the earliest known version of the meme. In the meme, following the panels featuring Elvis and Michael Jackson, the meme includes a third panel about rapper Juice Wrld. The post received more than 24,000 likes in less than four months (shown below).

Spread

Days after the initial post, on September 27th, 2020, Instagram^[2] user @gekjah posted a variation of the meme that replace the image of Juice Wrld with XXXTenaccion. The post received more than 10,000 likes in less than four months (shown below, left).

Over the next few months, the meme continued to spread to other fan and meme communities on Facebook, Reddit and Twitter. On November 25th, 2020, for example, Redditor lamestlauren posted a variation that features the Crazy Frog in the /r/okbuddyretard ^[3] subreddit. The post received more than 700 points (99% upvoted) in less than two months (shown below, center).

The following year, on January 14th, 2021, the meme went viral on Twitter^[4] after user @CrypticNotAlone posted a variation that features Canadian rapper Nav. The post received more than 34,000 likes and 3,000 retweets in less than one week (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

Not available.

External References