Not Sure If Brilliant or Merely Pedestrian: Toward a Rhetoric of the Meme by Phill Alexander
Figure 21: The MemeCenter creation interface
The same tool could be used to create memes that don’t have their images stored in that database through their uploading software, but the expense to resolution is harsh if the image is very large. Anything over 500 x 500 pixels or so will start to blur. The user also has limited control over text size in the on-site tool.
For my example here, I chose to illustrate the ease of making a new version of “Joseph Ducreux/Archaic Rap,” one of my personal favorite memes. Ducreux was an eighteenth century French painter who had a penchant for interesting portraits. One of them consists of the artist pointing toward the audience with his hat tilted. This prompted many people unfamiliar with the audience to associate his body language with rap music (again, a bit of a potential racial issue here) but to write the lyrics as if they were semi-proper old English.
Figure 22: Decreux raps along with Biggie Smalls, from MemeCenter
Perhaps the most famous of the Ducreux memes is Figure 22, created from the chorus of the Notorious B.I.G. track "Get Money."
To replicate and recreate one of these memes, I needed the Ducreux photo. Luckily, it’s posted on the KnowYourMeme site. I next needed a semi-famous gatekeeper rap lyric. In this case I chose the controversial radio edited line “I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom/I’m crazy” from the Digital Underground track “The Humpty Dance.” I opened the Ducreux photo in Photoshop. I used the text tool to create my top and bottom text, applying a stroke to each set of letters. Then I saved. The result, Figure 23:
Figure 23: Decreux raps along with the Digital Underground
The entire process took me all of five minutes. And just like that, I’m a part of the meme conversation and off to 4chan to take my trolling.