But this person wasn’t just someone. It was Ariana Grande. Specifically, it was Ariana Grande teasing the release of her new album on Instagram. The post has more than two million likes and over 10,000 comments. Her version of the image was everywhere. Suddenly it all made sense. But how the hell did my weird Photoshop end up as a piece of marketing on the Instagram feed of one of the biggest pop stars in the world?
Interestingly, a version of the image appeared on what seems like a fairly random Twitter page called @shopcosmicgoo on November 2, 2018, five days before Ariana’s Instagram post went up, and one day before she released the single “thank u, next.” This is the same “cleaner” version that appeared on Tumblr in 2017. The post has no likes, no retweets, and no replies. This image, or some version of it, is the graphic Ariana (or her team?) used to create the Instagram post for “thank u, next.” But how did Ariana find it in the first place?
— h (@shopcosmicgoo) November 2, 2018
That’s a question that remains a mystery to me, and short of hearing from Ariana herself — I’ve reached out to her management as well as her record label, but thus far it’s been radio silence — I can only offer some theories. Ariana’s original tweet promoting the song went up on November 3 (the day of the song’s release). The responses to the tweet are littered with memes and tweaked images repeating the track’s hook. It’s likely that one of the thousands of responses was the phone image (there’s so much content that’s been removed from Twitter that it’s impossible to know for sure). It’s also possible that a larger meme account (the kind notorious for, perhaps, liberally sharing images it didn’t create) picked it up in the days just before she posted her version and her team caught wind of it. Or like everyone else on the internet who posted this updated — but pre-Ariana — version of the meme (several of whom I contacted while working on this post, none of whom created it), it was found on Tumblr with no attribution and they simply shared it elsewhere.
In many ways it’s the perfect meme in which a celebrity can take ownership — not quite familiar enough to most people to seem obvious, but steeped in meme culture with a sense of use and momentum behind it. And maybe more than anything, it’s just a funny image of an old phone with a basic-enough display onto which anyone can throw a rushed Photoshopped message, whether you’re a gadget nerd making a dumb joke, or a multimillionaire pop queen promoting your next blockbuster single. I guess when you really look at it, Ariana and us bloggers have a lot more in common than you think — we all love Nokia phones.
I feel lit inside just thinking about.