Eighteen days ago, Vine user Jamie1947 uploaded a short video clip with the caption “message to my haters.” It’s an a cappella song with simple but effective lyrics: “When I get famous and I own a bunch of falcons / you won’t be laughing then.” It’s very funny. Take a few seconds and watch it:It’s a pretty good weird Twitter or Vine joke—absurd, silly, offering a funny twist in the space of very little time—but it’s since become the platonic ideal of a weird Twitter or Vine joke, in that it has now become an elaborate game of one-upsmanship. Rather than inspiring a bunch of people to steal the joke or to put out their own crappy remakes, it’s inspired them to keep it going with great remakes, many of which re-interpret the song in different genres or using new instruments. There’s a polka cover, dubbed footage of Johnny Cash singing the song, and an instrumental trumpet version. There’s a version that sounds like Amy Winehouse, one that's more or less a James Blake song, and another that’s a dead ringer for Jason Mraz.In the past few weeks, more than 160 Vine posts hashtagged #OwnABunchaFalcons have gone up, and while some are bad parodies that change the lyrics or straightforward spoken word copies of the joke, an impressive number are tributes that make the joke better. The result is a kind of beautiful trip through the musical canon and an exercise in seeing how different genres impact the way we might think about a piece of music. #OwnABunchaFalcons is like a folk song or pop standard for the modern era, a six-second experiment in the ways regular people—or, more accurately, the artists among us—can offer their own take and interpretation on a musical idea.While this is the kind of thing that could easily veer into annoying self-promotion—Jamie1947 already has a follow-up Vine encouraging the Today Show to book him—it's worked because it's basically just a nonsense collection of lyrics and melody that anyone can put their own twist on. It's great because the source material of #OwnABunchaFalcons is inherently dumb, which means that nobody’s going to ruin it, like they might with an acoustic cover of a rap song, and they’re not going to overthink their cover either. It’s just going to happen and then go up on social media and keep the train of this particularly weird song rolling. In the same way that we like Migos because listening to them becomes an interactive experience lived out on social media, #OwnABunchaFalcons is art that we all can be a part of. What is the internet for, if not enabling anyone in the world to make their own polka cover about falcons as a message to their haters and post it on Vine? Here are some of the best:
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