On 16 February, Joshua Holz posted a video on Twitter of his friend Daniel Lara. Filmed around a typical US high school, the video is literally just edited shots of Lara walking around and Holz saying “damn, Daniel” in a funny voice. “Damn, Daniel” he says as Lara walks near a swimming pool. “Damn, Daniel” again when he’s sitting on a bench tying his shoelaces. Sometimes it feels like Lara isn’t part of the joke, while at other times he mugs for camera, striding around as Holz says laconically “Back at it again in the white Vans” in reference to his box-fresh trainers (unsurprisingly Vans are quite big fans of the video and the subsequent meme). This being 2016, the clip went viral, with Holz’s tweet alone having had 343,000 retweets and almost half a million likes.
Its ubiquity as a meme has now been cemented by its appearance in rapper Pusha T’s new single Drug Dealers Anonymous, which features Jay Z repurposing the Vans line to fit with his own dealer-turned-legit-businessman narrative (“damn Daniel, FBI keep bringing them all white vans through”). You can almost hear Jay Z laugh at his own brilliance when that line comes to an end and yet in the rapid-fire world of the internet the reference already feels dated. In fact, a couple of days after Holz posted the video and the whole thing spread online like a disease, rappers Little, Teej and LeBlanc released Damn Daniel, an airy trap-influenced song that imagines what Danny might be like as a person (“always cheated on my test”).
In a wider context though, Jay Z’s timing couldn’t be better. Hip-hop and meme culture are more entwined then ever, especially within the context of rap “beefs”. In the world of Instagram, where images are repurposed and given new contexts by adding incongruous phrases, rappers can make statements about other rappers through (albeit fairly heavy-handed) code. So 50 Cent – who XXL magazine referred to as “hip-hop’s greatest troll of all time” - can utilise memes to make subtle digs at his foes (his ongoing hashtag #NoPuffyJuice pokes fun at Diddy’s rival drinks company), or hilariously narrate a moment one of them got attacked in a lift by their sister-in-law.
When Drake and Meek Mill started their beef, Drake’s eviscerating Back to Back triggered a million hilarious memes, some of which acted as the backdrop to Drake’s OVO Fest performance in 2015. Nicki Minaj is also prone to popping a meme up on her Instagram, either ones relating to Nicki Minaj or just something amusing regarding the lottery or hair extensions.
While Drake has created and courted memes over the last couple of years – the cover of his latest album Views was ripe for reappropriation – Kanye West’s mixture of gargantuan ego, ludicrous proclamations of his own genius and perceived lack of self-awareness has also become meme gold. The most recent one played on a picture of him taking a nap while shopping with his wife and daughter. Thanks to a Reddit thread dedicated to turning the image into a meme, we now have Kanye sleeping on sad Keanu (the latter being a separate meme), Kanye bored during a Darth Vader monologue and – why not! – falling asleep in the presence of prospective financier Mark Zuckerberg.
In a culture full of big characters where dirty laundry is often aired in public, rappers constantly leave themselves open to the playfulness of the internet. The recontextualisation explicit in meme culture is also mirrored in hip-hop itself, which has utilised popular culture references since its birth. In a lot of ways referencing popular memes in rap songs is just an extension of this conversation – a time-stamp reminding us about that time the world got briefly excited by someone saying someone else’s name.
