"Me, an Intellectual" Meme Brings Fleetwood Mac Back on the Billboard Charts

Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" is one of the classic-rock band's most popular songs. Released on the band's seminal 1977 album Rumours, the track features one of the most recognizable vocal performances of Stevie Nicks and was the band's only song to reach Number One on the Billboard Hot 100. Now, more than four decades later, “Dreams” has returned to the Billboard charts, thanks to a remix video featuring the song that’s gone viral on the social media.

In late March, Twitter user @bottledfleet tweeted a Me, an Intellectual joke countering a claim that one couldn't dance to Fleetwood Mac with a remix video of a cheerleading squad absolutely killing it with a synchronized dance routine to the opening verse of "Dreams."

In just about two weeks, @bottledfleet’s remix clip gained more than 6.2 million views and 138,000 retweets. Not only that, its viral success sparked a remarkable surge of social media interest around the song. Within the first week of the tweet, Billboard saw a 36% surge in downloads and a 24% jump in streams of “Dreams,” or nearly two million listens. Yesterday, Fleetwood Mac’s social media miracle reached its peak with “Dreams” resurfacing on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs Chart at #14, a new kind of milestone that only a few other artists can lay claim to.

The power of @bottledfleet's tweet extended beyond the music world. The clip also led to a resurgence of the discussion surrounding so-called Digital Blackface, a practice of white people using GIFs and reaction images featuring black people to illustrate their emotions online. American technologist Andy Baio expressed concerns over the popularity of the video. As he put it, it "feels disrespectful to take video of these women, re-dub it with an all-white rock band, and turn them into a meme."

After doing some internet sleuthing, Baio was able to identify the women in the video as the Golden Girls of Alcorn State University, and that they were dancing to a rendition of the song "Stay" by Eternal performed by the school's marching band, Sound-O-Dynamite. Baio then linked to a Teen Vogue article about Digital Blackface.

Baio's misgivings were countered by several black Twitter users who basically replied "Black people love Fleetwood Mac too." New York Times Magazine writer Jenna Wortham, a self-professed friend of Baio, replied to him saying his take left out the feelings of the cheerleaders involved in the video and suggested that the meme was more indicative of how black people can "put stank on anything" than an erasure of black culture.

With a simple but well-executed remix, one memer left an impact on both the music and social criticism worlds. Memeing in 2018: it can change the world.