Desiigner's BET Awards Performance

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About

Desiigner's BET Awards Performance refers to a still image of the American hip hop recording artist Desiigner wearing an exasperated expression and flailing his arms during a performance at the 2016 BET Awards ceremony.

Origin

On June 26th, 2015, the hip-hop artist Desiigner performed his single "Panda" at the 2016 BET Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, California. During the performance, he was filmed throwing his microphone up into the air and wearing an intensely surprised facial expression while walking down the aisle in the audience (shown below).

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That evening, Twitter user @Pretty_MoneyMMG^[1] posted a screen captured image of Desiigner throwing his mic while walking in the audience with the caption "Lmaoooo" (shown below, left). Meanwhile, other Twitter users began mocking the expression worn by rapper Fabolous in the shot (shown below, right).

The same night, the rapper Fabolous tweeted about his reaction to Desiigner's performance, claiming that he was caught "off guard" (shown below)^[2]. Within 72 hours, the tweet gathered upwards of 63,000 retweets and 50,900 likes.

Minutes later, Twitter user @gunnarkaufman^[9] posted the image with the caption "Fabulous is me at every party" (shown below, right). On June 27, Twitter user @whereX tweeted the picture along with the caption "Desiigner is Monday and i'm Fabolous waking up on Monday" (shown below, right).

The same day, the 56,154,423 views YouTube channel uploaded a slideshow of image macros and photoshops featuring still images of Desiigner (shown below). Within 48 hours, the video gained over 500,000 views and 200 comments. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the meme, including Bossip,^[3] Fader,^[4] EW,^[5] HipHopWired,^[6] Refinery29^[7] and DesignNTrend.^[8]