So What's Wrong With Takin' The Backstreets?

About

So What's Wrong With Takin' The Backstreets is a lyric from All Star by Smash Mouth. In mid-July of 2017, an image from the All Star music video with the lyric beneath it became a reaction image popular on Reddit, and variations blocked out letters of the lyric so that they read something else, similar to the evolution of I See You're a Man Of Culture and Now This Looks Like a Job For Me memes.

Origin

"All Star" was released on May 4th, 1999. In the song, one of the lyrics in the first verse is "So much to do, so much to see, so what's wrong with takin' the backstreets?" (shown below.)

On July 4th, 2017, Instagram user @fvckyoumeme^[4] uploaded a screenshot of the lyric to make an anal sex joke in a post that gained over 2,300 likes (shown below).

Spread

The meme in which people edited the lyrics began spreading on /r/dankmemes on July 11th, 2017. The subreddit had been editing Now This Looks Like a Job For Me in similar ways in the days prior. On the 11th, TheOriginalEsox^[1] uploaded the first edit of the "All Star" video, editing @fvckyoumeme's post and gaining 32 points (shown below, left). Shortly after, JStoner3^[2] uploaded a version that gained over 3,000 points, likely inspiring the creation of other examples (shown below, right).

The latter post was uploaded to /r/MemeEconomy^[3] four hours later, where it gained 224 points. Meanwhile, the format continued trending on /r/dankmemes. Popular posts include a post by tacomaster05^[5] that gained 466 points (shown below, left) and a post by tbsgrave^[6] that referenced the prior Eminem meme and gained over 1,600 points (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References