Music

Junk Explained: Why Is Everybody Going Hogwild For Peppa Pig’s ‘My First Album’?

It's a story that involves Iggy Azalea, stan culture, and an internet vlogger.

by Joseph Earp  25 July 2019
Peppa Pig -- My First Album

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In time, 2019 might well be revealed as the year that stan Twitter morphed from niche, scattered online fandoms to something of an international force.

After all, stans — or, hardcore devotees of a popstar, film franchise, or subculture — no longer just spend their time swapping information about the source of their obsessions with one another, or encouraging the internet at large to stream a particular song so that it might break the charts.

These days, stans are organised. In the last six months alone, for instance, fans of South Korean pop act BTS took on a tone-deaf and insensitive Channel 9 segment. Taylor Swift stans swamped a number of journalists for criticising the questionable ethics behind her ‘You Need To Calm Down’ music video. And Freddie Mercury stans — yes, they exist — called for Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh to be fired after they made a joke about the Queen singer’s teeth in their Golden Globes monologue.

Indeed, stan culture is so complex, so powerful, and so all-pervasive that it was always going to end up as a subject of parody — how else does this internet age understand major events than by making memes of them?

Only, interestingly, this time the stans have beaten everyone to the punch, and are currently in the process of lightly parodying themselves.

Using Peppa Pig.

Wait, Why Peppa Pig?

Peppa Pig is a gently middle-class animated pig who has expanded her reach from a pleasantly amusing children’s show into pretty much every form of entertainment fathomable. There’s a Peppa Pig stage show; a Peppa Pig videogame; and a Peppa Pig movie (in which she travels to Australia and meets a kangaroo, throwing up disturbing questions about why some animals in the Peppa universe can speak and walk, and others cannot).

Given her dominance, it was always inevitable that Peppa was going to drop an album. Which she did, last Friday. A jaunty collection of children’s songs, Peppa’s My First Album is pretty good if you have a three-year-old, and pretty boring if you don’t.

But, by chance, last Friday was also the date that Iggy Azalea dropped her long-awaited second album, In My Defence.

When Azalea was alerted to the clash in release dates, she panicked.

Then, moments later, Peppa shot back.

The light rivalry between Peppa and Iggy brought news of the children’s record to the attention of subcultures that might otherwise have missed the whole thing. Suddenly, the internet was rife with Peppa memes.

Peppa Pig, Queen Of Memes…

First, Anthony Fantano, a beloved alternative music vlogger, dished out his thoughts on the record.

The joke was a good one: pretend that a children’s record released by a pig was just like any other pop album. And before long, a raft of internet tricksters and celebrities got on top of it.

..And Queen Of Stans

Shortly thereafter, stans picked up on the trend, and the meme began evolving once more.

Suddenly, fake fan pages started springing up on Twitter. These pages, facsimiles of similar update accounts frequented by stans, began trotting out all the cliches of stan culture.

All of a sudden, Peppa was getting married to Tom Holland.

Then, she was collaborating with Frank Ocean.

Then, her father Daddy Pig, was tragically hospitalised due to heart problems.

Then, as the trend reached saturation point, stans started getting (jokingly) irritated with fake stans.

Suddenly, stan twitter was self-cannibalising; running through all of its own cliches. It’s all there, from stan on stan disputes, to stans getting irritated with journalists, to stans telling other stans to stream specific songs and game the charts.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising. After all, every movement has its meta moment eventually. Only, usually they don’t revolve around an animated pig.

Joseph Earp is a writer and critic who has known for many years that one day he’d sit down at a desk and write six hundred words on Peppa Pig and stan culture. You can find him at @Joe_O_Earp.