Slop, rap beef, brain rot and, yes, “hawk tuah” — what a year it’s been on the internet.
The colloquial definition of memes has expanded to include any type of viral internet phenomenon, including slang terms like “rizz” or “skibidi,” that comes alive on social media, according to Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, an online database that tracks trends.
“The literacy that is required to understand a meme can be very, very intense and complex, because you need to know five different memes throughout internet history to even get the joke,” Caldwell said.
Memes nowadays tend to emerge as references or reactions to something else, such as pop culture or news events, digital culture researcher Jamie Cohen said.
“If you’re chronically online or terminally online, a lot of these ways of reading media are almost like making translations in real time,” said Cohen, an assistant professor of media studies at City University of New York-Queens College. “Cultural savviness is more required for memes today than they’ve ever been.”
For those who were not extremely online this year, NBC News rounded up the biggest memes and moments that shaped 2024.
Brat summer
From green walls to presidential campaigns, “Brat,” Charli XCX’s sixth studio album, was inescapable this year. The album redefined the word “brat,” serving as a rejection of perfection. To be “brat” is to be, as Charli XCX put it, “honest, blunt and a little bit volatile.” It’s fitting that a record so hedonistic and vulnerable would soundtrack a chaotic year full of elections, celebrity beef, unprecedented natural disasters and more.
Charli XCX had hovered in pop music’s “middle class” for years, but her latest release unexpectedly catapulted her to previously unknown heights. The virality most likely helped her snag multiple Grammy nominations, including one in the coveted album of the year category.
The great X-odus
First it was Mastodon. Then Threads. Now Bluesky (again). Former Twitter users have been intermittently fleeing what is now X ever since Elon Musk bought it in 2022, but its largest user exodus began right around this year’s election. Over the last month, millions of users — including many celebrities and brands — have flocked to alternative text-based social media apps like Bluesky and Threads, both of which had significant spikes in user signups after the election.
Many X users have pointed to growing issues such as bots, partisan advertisements and harassment. Following previous waves of users’ abandoning the app for a coveted but still-elusive Twitter replacement, the discontent reached another tipping point this year when Donald Trump was re-elected president with Musk’s support. Meanwhile, Musk has been touting X as a replacement to news media outlets.
The Olympics were arguably the cultural moment of the year. The 19-day event featured lavish opening and closing ceremonies and a slew of athletic triumphs (including some by Team USA, which took home 125 medals). Many buzzworthy moments gained traction online, turning some competitors into even bigger stars and energizing people watching at home.
Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen captivated the world with his TikTok videos about the muffins at the Olympics Village; Kim Ye-ji, a South Korean pistol shooter, and Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikeç impressed viewers with their skills and style; Team USA gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik (aka “pommel horse” guy) and Team USA rugby player Ilona Maher became so popular during the Games that they got cast on “Dancing With the Stars.”
It was also a star-filled affair. Céline Dion closed out the opening ceremony with her first performance since she announced her diagnosis with stiff-person syndrome in 2022. The Games closed with the literal and figurative passing of the torch to Los Angeles, where the Summer Games will take place in 2028. The ceremony included a Tom Cruise stunt and performances from artists including: H.E.R., the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Billie Eilish.
‘Hawk tuah’ taking the internet by storm
“Hawk tuah” became a massive internet meme this summer when, in response to a street interview asking what move makes a man “go crazy” in bed, Haliey Welch remarked in a Southern twang: “You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang.”
As the clip gained traction, Welch was launched into overnight stardom, propelled by a Barstool-esque crowd of internet users who lauded her bold, unapologetically sexual humor. Though many online snarked on the merits of her newfound fame, “Hawk Tuah girl” has leveraged the attention to build a brand off the slogan, including her podcast, “Talk Tuah,” and other business ventures.
‘Very demure’ and an effort to trademark virality
In 2024, everyone became obsessed with being “very mindful” of their actions and acting “very cutesy” or “very demure.” The phrases became online phenomena after a TikTok user named Jools Lebron made a video explaining how she handles a wide variety of daily situations.
With the viral fame came an unexpected trademark battle for Lebron after a surprise trademark application in August sparked a frenzy over the legal rights to the viral phrase. Lebron documented the struggle to gain control over the “Demure” trademark, showcasing just how difficult it is for creators to monetize their sudden internet fame.
Eventually, Lebron told her followers, she was able to work out the trademark issue. She has transitioned into a career making content full time, and she said she was able to pay for the rest of her gender transition thanks to the revenue she made from brand deals.
The rise of ‘underconsumption core’
Over the past few years, there seems to have been a constant pressure for people online to buy the latest trendy item, from Stanley water bottles to clothing emulating the hottest, newest aesthetic. But buying into every fad has strained consumers’ wallets — and created piles of clutter in their homes.
“Underconsumption core,” popularized this year on TikTok, encourages people to reject the microtrends and focus on the things they actually use and enjoy on a daily basis. If you remind yourself that you have everything you need, it can be easier to avoid falling into the trap of the newest trends. It is the latest trend to encourage the normalization of not spending money, joining other movements popularized online like “loud budgeting” and “de-influencing.”
A lookalike frenzy
Creator Anthony Po is known for putting on outlandish events in New York City, but the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest is perhaps his pièce de résistance. After thousands — including the real Chalamet — attended the lookalike contest, numerous copycats popped up all around the world.
Since the Chalamet event in October, lookalike contests for celebrities like Jeremy Allen White, Zayn Malik, Paul Mescal and Dev Patel have also cropped up, drawing big crowds across various cities.
The proliferation of ‘AI slop’
Jesus, but he’s half-shrimp. Flight attendants heroically wading through mud with their Bibles. Deformed, malnourished or chronically ill children begging for birthday “likes.” The explosion of artificial intelligence-generated art gave rise this year to a tsunami of AI slop, usually characterized by its nonsensical anatomical errors and increasingly outlandish image concepts. To many online, the images might be easily recognized as fake. But others are not so discerning.
Often shared by networks of Facebook spam pages, such images have received hundreds of millions of engagements from people commenting “Amen” on the bizarre biblically themed imagery, praising the efforts of an AI-generated child who supposedly built an elaborate statue out of plastic bottles or wishing happy birthday to fake children sitting pitifully in the mud. The phenomenon has amused and befuddled users, with some wondering whether bot activity or potential scammers are involved.
The return of the diss track and Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s never-ending beef
This year brought the resurgence of the diss track, a crucial tool in hip-hop culture for hashing out rivalries. At the center of the trend were rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar, whose longtime feud reached a boiling point this year.
The squabble first blew up online when Lamar dissed Drake and J. Cole in his song “Like That,” a collab with Future and Metro Boomin released in March. Drake in turn responded with his own diss tracks “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle,” the latter of which he took down after he faced legal action for using the AI-generated voice of the late Tupac Shakur. Their back-and-forth continued throughout the summer as the rappers churned out track after track. Drake took their beef to court — claiming in a filing last month that Universal Music Group, the distributor for both rappers’ labels, “artificially inflated” numbers for Lamar’s “Not Like Us” on Spotify.
Our collective ‘brain rot’
Oxford University Press defines “brain rot,” its word of the year, as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”
The term has primarily been linked to Gen Alpha, defined as children born after 2010, who have created their own language within their online communities. Brain rot lingo is often associated with words like: “sigma,” someone who is cool or a leader; “gyatt,” which is an exclamation for a curvaceous woman; and “Skibidi,” as in “Skibidi Toilet,” a term derived from a YouTube series that is now used to mean basically anything.
