It only seems fitting to start off this newsletter with its namesake: berries and cream.
As in, I’m a little lad who loves berries and cream.
If you’ve been on TikTok in the last month or so then a little jingle just started playing in your head. Or maybe even one of its many, many remixes or mashups.
The berries and cream meme is one of TikTok’s many flash-in-the-plan trends that are what make me love the platform so much, much as I once loved Vine (RIP). In truth I think we’re well passed comparing TikTok to Vine in any way that goes beyond them both having short videos and meme potential. There was a purity to Vine in that the people who owned it blissfully didn’t really know its full potential. If Vine was Friendster, then TikTok is Facebook. It’s a fully-realized money-making machine with licensed music and ad options to boot. There were surely Vine stars, but nothing reaching the height of Charli D’Amelio or kicking off music careers a la Lil Nas X.
I may save a “Is TikTok really the new Vine?” entry for another day, so I’ll leave it at that, but my point is that memes travel through TikTok the way the once travelled through Vine — quickly and with the kind of humour that blurs the line between ironic and not.
The berries and cream thing is a great example of that. A silly little commercial jingle reformed and remixed into an unending library of off-the-cuff humour. A meme so silly and simple that it won’t (and, by extension, the name of this newsletter) make much sense a month from now. And I love that for memery, and I love that for me.
But it’s also a prime example of the strange ways brand attempt to cash in on something as ephemeral as a no-thinking-required meme.
Let’s get into it.
The origin
Since it’s not hard to find, I’ll be brief about where this all started. The berries and cream song comes from a 2007 Starburst commercial for when they made a flavour called… berries and cream.
I think this sort of attempt at bizarre humour was in style at the time for commercials. I don’t recall seeing it at the time (I think I was busy being a teenager) but it’s trying to skirt that line between cringe and ironic.
The important bit here is the song. And look, it’s not like there weren’t memes back then. People memed it. People sang it loud IRL. It wasn’t not a thing.
Starburst was also keen for it to be a thing. They made and posted a video featuring the little lad teaching his little dance.
And remixes were made! I found this one from 2008.
But it didn’t travel as fast and as quickly online. Twitter was a baby, Facebook had only recently been made available to non-students, Reddit was even creepier than it is now. It was a different time, ya know?
✨Fast forward✨ to January 2021, and Justin McElroy, of the The McElroy Family, of My Brother, My Brother and Me and The Adventure Zone podcasts fame, posted the dance lesson video on TikTok1 with a plea to “make great art with this sound.”
Is this a lazy way to make social content? Definitely. But Justin McElroy has a following and as we all know, that’s not even really a prerequisite for something to go viral on TikTok.
Anyway. It took a bit to catch on, but by summer the memes began anew, with peak berries and craeamania occuring mid-September.
The goods
Cleary, I enjoy this meme. In fact I’m kind of mad it started with a commercial because that makes it less ~pure~ but whatever, it’s still good.
One of the initial bits was using the sound to indicate something old-timey, which makes sense because the lad looks like a haunted Victorian child. Like in this application from @laurenurry.
And it’s sort of about being old timey in a way that’s slow, fancy, and particular. Like this, from @yellabella12.
But naturally it moved on from there to being more about the lad and his song and dance number. Like this riff on the “mama said that it was okay” meme from @howe_about_no.
Actually frankly it’s a lot of haircut jokes. You get it.
But the true hero here, for me, is Jacob Sutherland. He’s been mixing the berries and cream song into other songs.
I don’t know why (and neither does my girlfriend, who just now, in a disappointed voice, said to me “omg are you listening to berries and cream?”) but I fucking love a mashup. I’ve been fucking delighted everytime one of Sutherland’s mixes comes up on my For You Page. I have giggled. I have wept. I have clapped like a seal doing a trick.
I mean, please, for your own sake click all these links.
Time After Time x Berries and Cream (seriously the best one)
Sutherland even makes all his mashups available to download on his website. What a gem.
I’d also like to point out that the little lad is now a fully-grown person who looks great in mesh.
Jack Fever, who uses they/them pronouns, has reprised their role on TikTok and you can even get a Cameo from them. Which, sure. Get paid, little lad!
But oh no!
Obviously it would be too much to ask that Starburst not notice its song had gone viral, but alas. It’s fair, I guess. It’s their song.
For Halloween, Starburst had made a Little Lad costume and is having a giveaway to win one of said costume that you definitely could have put together by visiting one Valuye Village and one Spirit Halloween.
I’m pretty torn about it. On the one hand, it’s a relief that Starburst hasn’t (at least so far) gone overboard and revived the flavour (we don’t need another Szechuan sauce incident), or re-released the commercial, or gone all out on social media (there’s nothing on their Instagram about it, for example).
For all the sudden attention the meme got, the costume thing is pretty lacklustre. But I think that also points to how generally useless brands are at capitolizing on memes. The internet moves far too quickly for big-name brands to keep up with. By the time the upper-level management signs on to a campaign, let alone produces it, the moments over.
So, good effort this time, I guess.
But, on the other hand, what if the pieces fit together a little too neatly?!2
Thanks for reading!
Hey, you made it! I want to let you know what to expect from Berries and Cream moving forward. Like, this newsletter, not the meme itself.
As you may know if you were already following me, about a month ago I left my job as a reporter at BuzzFeed News where I covered internet culture (including TikTok). I’m still writing, just not as a full-time journalist.
This newsletter is mostly a way to indulge in my love of the internet, but without a boss or deadlines or an editor who takes away my (proper) Canadian spelling.
That means I’m pretty much going to be writing this whenever I feel like, about whatever I want. I’m not a hot take kinda person, this is more of a space to geek out.
So if you liked this, tell your friends! Tell your moms friends! Tell your dog! And feel free to tell me what you liked about this debut edition.
This newsletter will remain free for the time being. I may change that one day but in the mean time, thanks for coming along.
lol so I can’t embed TikToks in a Substack letter, so enjoy the links!
JK, I am not a meme conspiracist.