I TOKENIZED YOU, SO YOU’RE MINE FOREVER ON THE BLOCKCHAIN. Image: Laina Morris
Remember Overly Attached Girlfriend, the meme that went viral in 2012 at the height of the Impact Font meme trend?
You do, of course. That meme was all over the place in 2012, including this very location. It’s an early social media meme that deserves to be inducted into the Meme Hall Of Fame.
Highlight
The Overly Attached Girlfriend meme today sold for $411,000, joining the growing club of memes as NFTs.
The buyer is 3F Music, a Dubai-based music studio, whose NFT collection includes the NYT meta-NFT and other memes such as Bad Luck Brian.
Laina Morris, the real-life Overly Attached Girlfriend, was helped out by the creator of Nyan Cat and the man whose childhood face is now widely shared as Bad Luck Brian.
Laina Morris, the Internet star famous for her Unnecessarily Attached Girlfriend meme, sold a tokenized edition of the meme today for 200 ETH ($411,000).
The buyer of the meme NFT is 3F Recording, a Dubai-based music company that paid $560,000 for The New York Times’ NFT last Thursday.
Morris’s spoof video of Justin Bieber’s then-latest song “Boyfriend,” posted in 2012, inspired Overly Attached Girlfriend. Morris’ video, which has been watched 21 million times, featured the now-memefied picture of Morris as well as a clingy rendition of Bieber’s hit single.
The video stereotyped an aggressively clingy girlfriend over the lyrics of Bieber:
If I was your girlfriend / I’d never let you leave / without a small recording device / taped under your sleeve
I’ll always be checking up on you / Hey, boy, who you talking to? / Spend a day with your girl, I’ll be calling you my husband.”
Morris has maintained a love-hate relationship with memes for years. She tweeted in June 2012, “I’m still entertained by the @OvrlyAttachdGF tweets.” Then I remember my face is connected to it, and I’m a little disturbed Still amazing.”
But things have changed now that the demand for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, enables digital phenomena to be cryptographically encrypted as collectibles and sold for a huge profit.
“You’re really gonna make me emotional over a creepy face I made 9 years ago?!,” she said today in a tweet. “Truly, you have no idea how this is going to change my life. I mean it. I am so incredibly thankful and also still just BLOWN AWAY. So weird. So cool. Wtf. Thank you, internet.”
Morris and the new owner of the NFT cannot block others from sharing the meme because NFTs do not confer ownership. However, it maintains authenticity, just like a digital autograph from Morris herself.
The meme club
Morris was inducted into the NFT by two Internet personalities who marketed their memes as NFTs. The first is Chris Torres, a visual artist who created the Internet’s favorite Nyan Cat, a pixelated cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso. Torres sold the Nyan Cat NFT in February for about $580,000. Kyle Craven, the voice behind the Bad Luck Brian meme, is the second; Craven sold an NFT of the meme for $36,000 on March 11.
Other famous Internet memes that have recently sold as NFTs include the Keyboard Cat, which sold for nearly $69,000 on March 13, and the Scumbag Steve Meme, which sold for $62,000 on March 15.
3F Music also purchased the NFTs for Creepy Chan, a 2005 meme, last night.
Creepy Chan I went for $72,000, and Creepy Chan II went for $82,000.
