Celebrating the Web's earliest viral hits

[alvpat]

...Back when the internet was young -- we're talking way before YouTube viral videos, Twitter memes and catchy Facebook statuses -- people were entertained by much simpler pleasures.

The most memorable viral statements of the late 1990s and early 2000s? Animated GIFs (short for Graphics Interchange Format) -- those crude little animated clips that popped up on websites or got forwarded around in e-mails.

Small enough to download quickly on your 56K modem and even e-mail as an attachment, kinetic icons such as Peanut Butter Jelly Time and Dancing Baby, the 3-D toddler who danced his way across the Web and into Ally McBeal's hallucinations, were once the most popular memes on the net.

If you missed the GIFs revolution, Evan Roth has compiled an excellent 10-minute video called Cache Rules Everything Around Me. (Hip-hoppers will notice the pun on the seminal Wu-Tang Clan hit "C.R.E.A.M.: Cash Rules Everything Around Me.")

More a visual homage to GIFs than a history lesson, "Cache Rules Everything Around Me" features everything from classic cat animations to home-video pratfalls to the George W. Bush shoe-throwing attack.

The new video is set to Girl Talk's "Night Ripper," which itself is a mash-up of popular songs from the past couple of decades.

If that's not enough, Complex Magazine offers a hilarious history of the 50 Greatest Animated GIFs of All Time.

Cheers
Alv

[RockON!!]

(Hip-hoppers will notice the pun on the seminal Wu-Tang Clan hit "C.R.E.A.M.: Cash Rules Everything Around Me.")

Wu-Tang, the biggest group in hip-hop history, could not let it take its most successful hits in the form of a long-overdue greatest hits album ("Legend Of The Wu-Tang") appear to have. The Method Man, RZA, GZA, Ol'Dirty Bastard, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, U-God, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa and Cappadonna from existing group dominated in the nineties, the New York hip-hop scene like no one. The Wu-Tang Clan hip-hop culture influenced not only by its music and its Shaolin style, but also with their clothing style.

On rap style of each rapper has, in contrast, hardly changed over the years what. I think it's also good that the Wu-Tang Clan "his style of hiphop" maintained and has remained in the lyrics "real and deep". It is quite simply been very surprising how successful the Wu-Tang Clan with his New York underground hip-hop over so many years in the music business was going on. That deserves respect!!