About

Neil Banging Out the Tunes refers to an image of a rat in front of a toy piano captioned "Neil Banging Out the Tunes April 13 2006." Once the picture got popular in the mid 2010s, it's spread online every April 13th.

Origin

The earliest known post to feature the image was posted to Tumblr by user lambhoof. While the account is deactivated, a post by user Lara-newman^[1] on December 11th, 2014 is the earliest extant reblog of the post.

Spread

Posts celebrating the anniversary of the picture began appearing in 2016. A thread about the image appeared on NeoGAF^[2] on April 13th, 2016. Tumblr user jackalopejess^[3] posted a GIF celebrating the ten year anniversary that day (shown below, left). User Jasper-rolls posted about the anniversary that day and has reblogged the post on every April 13th since, leading the post to gain over 104,000 notes (shown below, right).^[4]

The animal has also spawned fan art and memes on Tumblr. User Urisday posted a GIF of the rat, gaining over 57,000 notes (shown below, left). User th13f-of-sp4c3 posted an Expanding Brain meme about the day, gaining over 47,000 notes (shown below, right).

On April 13th, 2019, musician Neil Cicierega joked that every April 13th, people tagged him in posts about the rat (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References