Posted by Nate Jones on 11/08/2012 at 5:52 PM News

The Popdust Files: Election 2012, mc hammer, politics

It was more than two months ago that we looked upon the rubble of that “Mad Men” Rickroll video and officially declared the “one-word edit” meme dead:

These videos are the worst kind of meme—the kind that just relies on the assumption that anything that includes two things the internet loves as much as Mad Men and “Never Gonna Give You Up” is bound to go viral on those keywords alone, without using any creativity or logic in the synthesis between the two. What’s next, the cast of Anchorman singing “Friday”? Speakers at the RNC and DNC singing “Living on a Prayer”? We should probably stop giving the internet ideas.

As luck would have it, the roulette wheel of the Internet’s attention landed instead on “Barack Obama” and “MC Hammer,” but the result is the same. Seeing dozens of split-second clips of Barack Obama edited into “Can’t Touch This” is not remarkably different from seeing dozens of clips of him edited into “Call Me Maybe.” But America’s bored office drones keep going crazy for this kind of meme regardless—and what can we humble music bloggers do but post them every time, and die a little more inside with each pageview.

[Vulture]