Inception
On May 3rd 2010, I tweeted this:
"I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven. When I awoke I spent that on a breakfast. #kanyefoodlyrics" (Real lyric within first 15 secs here.)
and 2 days later this:
"Mayonnaise covered pringles, I eat miracle chips. #kanyefoodlyrics" (original here)
Around this time period a couple friends came up with their own food lyrics. Example here.
Jokingly I said Kanye Food Lyrics are going global, son. At this point in time it was just one of my random musings.
Patient Zero
I can't really connect the dots here, and perhaps there is no way to connect them, but sometime in January/December, the kanye food lyric "No one man should have (also, "use") all that flour" started to catch on. The origin of this lyric I cannot trace, but the earliest use was in a random thread in July 2010, but I don't think it really caught on until it was used by a handful of random people in December/January in the Twitter-verse. The earliest example I can find is here (or perhaps here, but I can't verify the date) by some random comedian and it was also used by some well-followed internet writer Drew Magary here. Note that some uses of this lyric use my original hash tag of #kanyefoodlyrics.
The Meme
On January 9th, someone decided to really run with the "No one man should have all the flour" concept and designed a site around it. http://noonemanshouldhaveallthatflour.tumblr.com/ There's not a whole lot of content -- about 50 or so lyrics -- but there's a lot of interesting/hilarious stuff (eg pic below) and it's created somewhat of a stir and arguably sparked a broader internet meme.
Examples of popularity:
A search for "no one man should have all that flour" results in 23K google hits.
A search for "noonemanshouldhaveallthatflour," which returns sites that link to that certain website, yields 98K hits.
Someone actually did an entire food remix.
Toast to the douche bags.
Reach
I guess it's hard to really quantify or classify the gravity/reach of this meme, but I'm sure it's touched the computer screens of at least 100's of thousands of people (at least 98k links on the web for just that site and probably growing) and perhaps millions. And just a guess based on what I've seen through my searching, but easily thousands have come up with their own food lyrics.
What happened here?
Obviously I wrote and researched this whole thing because I wanted to see if there was evidence that I started this whole thing. I would say there's no evidence that I started it and it's extremely unlikely that I actually did (but technically possible.) There is, however, significant evidence that I was the first one to think of it -- my idea originating in May and the first other found instance in July. In the sciences, the first one gets credit for discovery, right?
Really I'm joking and don't think I was particularly hilarious or creative (if you have a good idea and can't execute -- eg creating a dedicated website, etc -- then who really cares), but it's remarkable something I joked about becoming a meme actually did 8 months later. It's especially remarkable given how unique/random/odd it is.
