Music

A Year Old Panic! At The Disco Song Has Become A Massive Meme. But Why?

The song is trending on TikTok.

by Joseph Earp  21 November 2019
High Hopes Panic! At The Disco song Pete Buttigieg

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

Last year, Panic! At The Disco dropped the single ‘High Hopes‘ and came roaring back into the cultural conversation.

The song was a bold new direction for the act. No mere throwback, it was thoroughly modern, filled with crashing electro and an ear-wormy chorus. It was also an enormous success, their highest ever charting single. Damned be to the haters: Panic! At The Disco were once more a massive pop act.

Why does any of this matter? Well, a whole year after the single first hit the airwaves it’s become a massive meme again — and thanks, weirdly enough, to a candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

It’s All Pete Buttigieg’s Fault

Pete Buttigieg is one of the democratic nominees for the Presidency. He’s gay, an army veteran, and a Christian.

He’s also proving to be something of the underdog in the race. While higher-profile candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker have either trailed in the polls or dropped out of the race altogether, Buttigieg has stayed strong.

Which is weird, given that Buttigieg’s reputation amongst both political commentators and the youth is as a daggy, overripe dad.

That’s where ‘High Hopes’ comes in: that reputation has not been helped by an extremely cursed video of his supporters practicing a dance to the Panic! At The Disco hit.

I could explain the thing, but it’s so deeply cursed that it needs to be watched in full, with as little context as possible:

Anyway, not content to keep their bold new dance behind closed doors, Buttigieg supporters have taken the thing out onto the streets, in one of the most inexplicable videos of the election cycle so far.

Weird stuff.

Which is exactly why the internet is obsessed with it.

And Now It’s A Meme

Since the video of the Buttigieg supporters went viral, a number of internet denizens have parodied the song, spawning a meta-meme.

Most notably, Adam Friedland of wildly popular podcast Cum Town did his thing with the track.

Inevitably, as the meme has gone on, the videos have gotten stranger and stranger.

Shit is wild, basically.

It’s also kinda good for Buttigieg, even if the joke is at his expense. The Presidential race is wildly overcrowded, and the video has the man back in the news cycle. Wait till the man himself appears on TV doing the dance — it’ll be a matter of days.