When the meme is being in on the meme
this does not intentionally rhyme with "berries and cream"
Alright I’m immediately realising that some people reading this probably don’t use TikTok and therefore probably don’t know what berries and cream is. Let’s do a whirlwind history lesson.
This was apparently a Starburst ad in 2007:
Side note, but the last couple of frames of actor Jack Ferver looking like they’re reevaluating all their life choices to that point is a real mood.
ALSO a side note, but according to their website, Ferver now does “genre defying performances, which have been called “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms” [that] explore the tragicomedy of the human psyche.” Which is a long way from the little lad dance. And also maybe not that far.
So anyway, Justin McElroy of “being a McElroy” fame uploaded this with the instructions “please make great art with this sound, it’s all we need,” in January of this year. I guess it took a while to take off, but then boy did it.
Morgan Sung wrote basically everything you need to know about berries and cream’s first wave of popularity, if you want to get into it. What I want to talk about is the second wave.
As Sung noted, people have been remixing berries and cream into basically any song/popular TikTok audio that exists. But at some point my whole For You page got taken over by people surfacing the weirdest possible combinations.
All this last wave of videos are like “what side of TikTok do you have to be on to get Flo Rida’s Low/Berries and Cream on your FYP?” A lot of the mashups actually mixed the little lad with other absurdist memes going around at the time, like “don’t be racist, I am a building,” and “Good Soup,” turning the whole of TikTok into a Duchampian fever dream for a while. And the only way to participate was to show that, yes, you too are in this special club.
It’s a fun phenomenon that I haven’t really seen discussed before. Usually people have to directly participate in trends, putting their own creative twist on them, but in this case there wasn’t really a way to do that. So being in on the meme became the meme itself.
Anyway, as you can probably tell if you are on TikTok, I actually wrote this post last week and then got very sick so I didn’t finish it, and berries and cream is mostly over. Apparently we’re all about Couch Guy now but I’ve mostly missed that which seems like it’s for the best.
But that has surfaced one last thing, which is that I’ve seen a few people lament their FYPs being taken over in this way. I have to say that I prefer these in-between periods, where I get a lot more of the people I follow doing their own weird thing. I wonder whether these sweeping trends will eventually inspire their own backlash to the way the TikTok algorithm works.