Album Meme Creator Kamala Harris Talks Meme-a-Thon

Wait, was that it? Kamala Harris walks out of a record store waving a vinyl copy of Grateful Dead alive/deadNo, it was actually Charlie XCX NaughtyNo, wait, it was Frank Zappa. One size fits allOr maybe it was Nirvana. It doesn’t matter Or GZA Liquid swords?

All of these answers are correct – sort of.

In the week since Harris was elected as the Democratic presidential nominee, music fans have been enjoying a photo taken last year of her exiting the HR (Home Rule) record store in the Washington, D.C. area. As part of Small Business Week, Harris walked into the independent store. They produced albums by Charles Mingus and Roy Ayers as well as collaborations by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Borgie and that’s it.

Last week, Mitch Said, a web designer and consultant based in Johannesburg, South Africa, started noticing people online swapping out Mingus’s album for other, more unexpected examples. “I wanted to make an album for myself,” he says. rolling stone“And I thought it would be nice and fun if everyone could do this really easily.”

Saeed (who holds dual South African and American citizenship) is a co-founder of a new startup called Ghostwriter and an advisor to Digital Kinetics. Last Friday night, his time and location were Kamala Vinyl Holdings It was released. With it, one could quickly type in the name of an album and instantly replace the Mingus record that Harris was already showing (let my kids hear music).

The result was a flood of memes depicting Harris “carrying” copies of modern classics (De La Soul’s book). 3 feet tall and tall), cult favorite (John Calley Paris 1919), and many underground punk records and hand-produced recordings. Unsurprisingly, Sonic Youth stickywhich spawned many memes, is also among them. He said himself: I started with British techno band Burial’s. Album incorrectwhich he describes as “the soundtrack to many a moody evening” in his life.

The memes certainly play on Harris’s taste in music. During her 2019 presidential campaign, the then-senator posted a summer playlist that included songs by artists rarely associated with a presidential candidate other than Barack Obama: Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Funkadelic, Buena Vista Social Club, Ariana Grande, A Tribe Called Quest, Bob Marley, and Bad Bunny. “She has real musical credibility,” says Saeed. “But people like the incongruity of her carrying things that you might not like.” He says he’s noticed that people seem to particularly enjoy including “extreme stuff,” like Cannibal Corps albums or anything produced by Steve Albini.

Although he doesn’t have hard data, Saeed estimates that his site has been visited a million times, and that hundreds of tweets attest to the rush to swap covers: “I thought there might be a little bit of acclaim and interest, but I didn’t expect the number of tweets I saw.” To Saeed’s shock, Questlove posted a response to his initial post, writing simply, “God bless you.” The memes seem so real that one briefly fooled producer and drummer Narada Michael Walden, who posted one of Harris holding a copy of the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s fusion standard. Inner Flame Ascension (“Amazing!”) before being corrected by his followers. (The Walden Band was a later incarnation of that band.)

At least Saeed and Harris don’t have to worry about how Charles Mingus’s heirs feel about Saeed’s meme-producing site. “We think it’s great—we’ve used it ourselves,” says Roberto Ungaro, Mingus’s stepson, who runs the Mingus heirs. “Anything that points us toward Mingus and his music and his values ​​is a move in the right direction.”