Fat Axl Rose

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About

Fat Axl Rose is an image macro series based on photographs of Axl Rose, the lead singer of the American rock band Guns N’ Roses, performing on stage with various captions mocking the overweight appearance of the hard rock icon.

Origin

On January 14th, 2010, The Winnipeg Free Press^[8] highlighted several pictures taken by photographer Boris Menkevich of Axl Rose performing at a Guns N' Roses concert in Winnipeg, Canada (shown below). The following day, the music news blog The Gauntlet^[7] highlighted the photographs in a post titled "OMFG Axl Rose is Fat."

Spread

On October 4th, 2011, Vice^[1] highlighted a photograph of Rose performing at a Guns N' Roses concert in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil under the heading "Axl Rose Got Fat" (shown below, left). On October 7th, BuzzFeed highlighted several captioned versions of the photo in a post titled "Fat Axl Is Fat" (shown below, right).

That day, a page titled "Fat Axl" was launched on Quickmeme.^[6] On October 8th, Tumblr^[3] user brian-harold-may posted the photo of Rose with the caption "Knock-Knock Knocking / on McDonald's Doors" (shown below, left). On October 10th, UpRoxx^[5] published a compilation of Fat Axl Rose memes (shown below, middle, right).

On June 5th, 2012, a Meme Generator^[9] page titled "Axl Rose is Fat" was created, containing captioned variations of the Menkevich photographs (shown below).

On December 8th, 2013, IGN Forums^[10] user Last_Poster submitted a post titled "I had no idea Axl Rose got so fat" highlighting the Menkevich photographs. On June 5th, 2015, the tech news site TorrentFreak^[8] reported that Rose had issued a DMCA takedown notice to Google, Facebook and YouTube to remove Menkevich's photographs.

On June 6th, Redditor 604national submitted a post about the DMCA notices to the /r/news^[2] subreddit, where many readers referenced the phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect in the comments section. In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the takedown notices, including Spin,^[11] Consequence of Sound,^[12] CNET^[13] and Rolling Stone.^[14]