Conventional wisdom holds that the explosive, meme-enabled viral popularity of surprise hits like Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” is one of those things that simply can’t be bought, that it has to occur organically in order for people to buy in, and that the magic evaporates as soon as anyone sees a marketer’s fingerprints on it. Which is hilariously wrong—if there’s one thing that consumers of American pop culture have proven again and again it’s that they couldn’t give a shit where the stuff comes from as long as they’re sufficiently entertained.
“#SELFIE” is unimaginative and blatantly bandwagon-jumping even for a fad-based novelty song, but it’s clever. For one thing, if the metric ton of surprisingly fearful trend pieces that have been published over the past year are right, young people these days love taking selfies. On a more subtle level, the narrator’s nonstop bitching about clubbing is probably appealing to the vast number of clubgoers who don’t live in big cities and spend their weekends going to see DJs play in strip malls and would like to affect the same kind of “over it”-ness.
