The Mystery Of The Avril Lavigne Dolphin Song

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Alright, Let’s Talk About Avril Lavigne’s “Dolphins”

Twitter users rediscovered the Avril Lavigne “Dolphins” song this week. A few Garbage Day readers sent this to me to see if I could get to the bottom of it. It’s honestly one of the more frustrating online mysteries there is because there simply doesn’t appear to be a good answer as to where these came from. Here are the “lyrics” to the “song”:

The closest anyone’s come to solving this thing was Ethan Chiel, a reporter writing for Fusion in 2016. This weekend I went back through Chiel’s original story and tried to see if there’s been any developments in the last four years.

Based on a Twitter search for “dolphin avril,” the earliest mention I could find about the song was from 2011, when a Avril fan account appears to have auto-tweeted a Hot Lyric page for “Dolphins”. It was then mentioned once in 2012, once in 2013, and then there was another flurry of activity in it in 2015. The 2015 spike appears to correspond to “Dolphins” trending on Tumblr at the same time. But the 2015 Tumblr meme references previous Tumblr posts about the song. Chiel traced the fake song lyrics back to at least 2007. But it may be even older. I found a Google cache that may date the song all the way back to 2005. I also searched for Portuguese results, as well, on the off chance it originated in Brazil, like the theory that Avril Lavigne was secretly replaced with an actress named Melissa. Though, Brazilian stans seem just as confused about “Dolphins”.

The song has all the hallmarks of a messageboard in-joke. I tried searching 4chan and LiveJournal archives from 2007, but didn’t find anything. I have this deep suspicion it started on a fan board, but I can’t prove it. So, unfortunately, Avril Lavigne’s “Dolphins” will remain a mystery.

But The “Mi Pan Su Su Sum” Mystery Has Been Solved

If you’ve been on TikTok in the last month or so chances are you’ve come across an audio clip that sounds like a little kid singing “Mi Pan Su Su Sum” while pounding on a table. The song is normally paired with a dancing llama. Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about.

I recently called it the song of the summer and I stand by that. A few weeks ago, NBC News reporter Ben Collins asked me if anyone knew who is singing in the original audio file. I got pretty far with it.

The actual song being sung is from an ad for a Russian cereal called Miel Pops. They basically look like Honey Nut Cheerios but with a sexy lady bee mascot? A quick aside, I found horny fanart of the Miel Pops bee, which then led me to a subreddit called r/HoneyFuckers, which is for people who like sexy bee pictures. You’re welcome.

The most common remix of “Mi Pan Su Su Sum” was uploaded to places like Apple Music and Spotify by an artist called Ev0lution. The DJ’s logo is a pixel art rendition of the Fortnite llama, which was posted to Reddit last year.

I found a DJ that goes by Ev0lution on Bandcamp. They’re from British Columbia and specialize in metal/EDM mashups. I don’t think this is the same person who remixed the TikTok song, but stranger things have happened. For what it’s worth, Apple Music groups together the metalcore/EDM DJ Ev0lution with the Mi Pan Su Su Sum Ev0lution on the same artist page.

I admittedly had hit a bit of a dead end, but a super helpful Twitter user named @samathalent sent me a link to the original vocalist’s TikTok account! They go by chernana.princessa and according to them, the remix that’s all over the internet is their voice pitch-shifted with a few tweaks to the beat.

So there you have it. Mi Pan Su Su Sum is an acapella rendition of a Russian cereal commercial that was then turned into a dance track by a DJ that may or may be Canadian and specialize in metalcore mashups. Also, there are a bunch of people on Reddit that apparently want to fuck bees.

OK, Here Are A Couple Tweets

An Important Flight Simulator Update

On Friday, I wrote about how everyone is using Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020’s hyper-realistic in-game map of the world to do a bunch of fucked up nonsense. My friend Cam Wilson over at Gizmodo Australia managed to find the person responsible for the Lovecraftian monolith that stands in the center of the game’s version of Melbourne.

The going theory is that the Melbourne nightmare tower was actually generated by accident because of a typo on OpenStreetMap that listed a house in the area as 212 stories tall. Well, Cam found the user responsible for the typo. He’s an architecture student named Nathan. His explanation for the typo is hilarious:

“We had to go in and put data about the suburbs into OSM. It was very monotonous and I made a few mistakes but I was like ‘fuck it, I don’t care,'” he told Gizmodo.

Here’s A Good Meme

(via theweirdwideweb)

This Is 2020’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”

There’s so much happening in this r/relationship_advice post. It’s really grim stuff.

• She bought her husband an Apple Watch.

• She let him know that she wanted a new silverware set.

• After he opened up his Apple Watch, he told her to check her Reddit account.

• He had “gilded” 24 of her comments on Reddit.

• She’s been waiting to see if this was a prank or something, but it’s been a week.

Unfortunately for the OP, the comment section on the post is a mess, with most commenters just bickering over whether Reddit Gold is worth it. If you aren’t familiar with how Reddit Gold works, gilding a comment gives a user a month of Reddit Premium. As for what you can do with Reddit Premium, you basically don’t get any ads and you can access the r/lounge subreddit lmao.

Here’s A Good Gamer Moment

And Lastly, Budweiser Shared And Deleted A Trad Meme

If you aren’t familiar with what the Budweiser account is referencing in that tweet up there, it’s a meme that’s used by Christian “trads” who like to fantasize about bringing back the crusades and blowing up Planned Parenthood clinics. The problem with the meme is that it’s used in a fascist context just as often as it’s used for just for any old joke.

Do I think there’s a secret fascist running Budweiser’s Twitter account? It’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that we’ve just reached a really dark moment in American culture where this country’s politics have been moved so dramatically to the right that it’s now almost impossible for the average person to know if they’re sharing a meme that was created by white nationalists or not.

I wrote a little bit about this last week in regards to the Hindutva talking point about Genghis Khan becoming a Twitter trending topic. I’m becoming more and more convinced that it will take possibly generations to wrestle back English-speaking internet culture from the far-right extremists who flooded social media platforms with content during the 2015-2018 “populism wave”. You see this same phenomenon happening with zoomer slang, where 4chan-influenced memes are evolving into just mainstream culture for young people. Here’s a really good take on how this works:

P.S. here’s a really good Arctic Monkeys song.

***All typos in this email are on purpose actually***