SpongeBob Floating / Kanye West Wolves

About

SpongeBob Floating or Kanye West Wolves refers to using the intro from his song Wolves to create a meme in which someone is floating up in the air with their feet dangling, referencing someone who has gained power that is flowing through them. This is best seen in the first example, an edit of a clip from Spongebob Squarepants in which Spongebob levitates and becomes surrounded by a heavenly light while the song plays. Though the visual of the clip suggests Spongebob achieving ultimate enlightenment, it is often paired with ironic captions showing a bad idea, akin to how the final panel in Expanding Brain edits shows the most obtuse variation on a theme. Later incarnations of this meme follow with the intended theme of having someone gain enlightenment or power, leading to the levitation.

Origin

On August 22nd, 2019, YouTuber Truevaporman posted an edit of a clip from the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Nature Pants"^[1] in which Spongebob appears to ascend and emit a heavenly aura, captioning the clip "High school niggas after they pass their Spanish class using nothing but Google Translate." The clip gained over 26,000 views (shown below). The song used in the clip is "Wolves (Intro)" by Kanye West.^[2]

The video used for the meme was created by the Instagram page @memed.jpg^[5] who first uploaded it on August 19th, 2019 and later uploaded a full HD version to YouTube on August 27th, 2019, complete with a tutorial of how he did it (shown below).

Spread

The same day, Twitter user @KingYandhi posted the clip with a Nobody joke, gaining over 80 retweets and 250 likes (shown below).

Over the course of the following weeks, the clip began spreading on YouTube and Instagram as people added various captions to the clip. Other examples include a post by Instagram user eye.mp4 referencing Juuls that gained over 8,500 views (shown below, left) and a compilation posted by YouTuber^[2] Daddylovesmemes too that gained over 71,000 views (shown below, right).

Adaptation

The meme continued to be adapted in memes following it's release. On September 5th, 2019, the TikTok user Soopoopphia^[3] uploaded the first in an ongoing trend of memes, saying that they had left the cage open the hamster started to attain power. This started a new trend in using the song to show someone who has done something out of the ordinary and gained power from it, leading to them levitating, (shown below).

Since the introduction of this new way to use the existing meme format, other situations were quickly added, such as a popular one about catching your parent's while they discipline you, as posted by TIkTok^[4] user Kudz, who gained 465,000 viewers in two years (shown below).

Various Examples