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sinesalvatorem:

Well, actually, just to the memes that were popular around me while I was in college. Most of these come from songs. I am tired of memeing around my American friends and having them be like “wut???”, so I am educating you all now.

I. [X] does give me me powers

The origin of this meme is the song Phenomenal by Benjai. It come from the line “Soca does gi’ me me powas; ey-ay”. ie: “[Caribbean music genre] makes me powerful; [sound of enthusiasm]”. The specific way this is used varies a lot.

Most commonly, it’ll be a comment on how something has given you the ability to do stupid things faster with more energy. “coffee”, “ganja”, “cocaine”, “manga”, and “pumpum” (ie: vagina) are all things I heard people say gave them powers (it has to be two syllables to fit the song). Alternatively, if your friend has just done something stupid, you can comment on it this way – usually attributing their sudden energy to something silly as a form of ribbing.

Alternatively, you can use it as an image macro, as we often do on WhatsApp (yes, we’re whatsappers). The general format here is a call-and-response macro. The first image is of the thing giving the powers, with the caption “[thing] does give me me powers”. The second image shows someone doing something silly, with either the caption “Ey Ay”/”Eh I” or the caption “See me deh/dey/there”.

Example from WhatsApp:

However, the punning potential is great and terrible

(I’m a horrible person, I know)

And, thus, you have been educated! Which is great, because I am constantly tempted to use this meme, and then have to refrain from it to avoid confusion. But no more! Go forth and meme like a true rudeboy

 

thetransintransgenic:

How does “[X] does give me me powers“ parse syntactically?

Specifically, what is each “me” doing? Do they both mean the same thing, and were just repeated for the meter to work? (Or for emphasis? Does [Redacted]-dialect repeat nouns for emphasis?)

Or are they doing different things? Are they both ~something about the speaker~ (with some grammatical effects), or is one of them totally unrelated?

 

sinesalvatorem:

“me” is the first person singular pronoun.

Yes, there aren’t first person singular pronouns. There is only one. It does the work of English I, me, and my.

So, replacing the ‘me’s with their equivalents, we get “Soca does give me my powers”.

But wait! What’s the “does” doing here?

It puts the sentence in the present tense, because “Soca give me my powers” would be past tense. The unmarked form of a verb in my dialect generally is.

So the sentence parses as “Soca gives me my powers” in standard English.

 

brin-bellway:

Ah, so that’s what the “does” was for.

(The doubled “me” didn’t confuse me, personally: my language-parsing module saw the second one, said “ah, it’s the cockney ‘me’”, and continued on. Apparently I’ve consumed enough British media for “’me’ can be used as a possessive” to be an available thought.)

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On an unrelated note: is it just me*, or does that song–especially the chorus–sound very…itself? Like, a song they would play over a location-establishing shot. “HAVE WE MENTIONED YET THAT WE’RE IN THE CARIBBEAN??”

Not in a bad way, just…intensely Caribbean.

*It might just be me and my lack of experience with the genre.

 

sinesalvatorem:

It is very much a quintessentially Caribbean song! Other songs that feel very strongly Caribbean to me include:

Notably, all of these songs are Trinidadian (the meme song included), because the quintessential Caribbean genres to me are Calypso and Soca. These are both Eastern Caribbean genres specifically (so, not popular in Jamaica), and Trinidad is by far the largest Eastern Caribbean country.

This may be a little provincial to be the “quintessential Caribbean genres”, but I’m from the Eastern Caribbean, and these are the songs I was raised on, so *shrug*

Huh, interesting. None of those feel like a faceful of Caribbean to me the way the meme one does.

When I try to intuitively categorise these songs, I get:

“Shame and Scandal”: 1960′s comedian who borrowed some instruments from a prog rock band, but isn’t using them in quite the same way. The narrative is one I previously heard in this song, which is presented as Irish folk but might have been written by a Canadian and from what I can tell it’s a bit of a confusing mess. (As soon as the protagonist in this one went to his father, before the father even said anything, I suspected what was going to happen and what the final punchline was going to be.)

“Obeah Wedding”: 1950′s proto-rock.

“Sweet Sweet Tnt”: Okay, kind of a faceful of Caribbean on re-listen, but the first thing it reminded me of was being at the community college recently during some kind of diversity fair, and waiting by the Mexico table for my ride to show up.

“Rally Round the West Indies”: circa-1980′s pop with some Caribbean influence.

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I think the lesson here is that the way one intuitively categorises music depends strongly on what music one is already familiar with. I’m tempted to throw some stuff from the Pop/Rock Hits of the Late 20th Century radio playlists at you and see what happens. Have you had enough exposure to that music for categorisation attempts to stop giving weird results?

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Tags:

#music #reply via reblog #North Americans are exotic creatures #long post

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