I try very, very hard to keep my ears away from today’s pop music, because autotuning is like Fran Drescher scraping her teeth across a chalkboard to me. So when some girl named Carly Rae Jepsen became an overnight sensation with a song called “Call Me Maybe” I was determined to avoid it as well, because people kept Tweeting about how catchy it was despite being terrible. Then I attended two weddings this weekend and that was shot to hell, because I think I heard it roughly a dozen times.
With that plan destroyed, I figured it was time to check out that Harvard baseball video that has racked up 8 million views on YouTube over the past few weeks. In case you’re unfamiliar – and if you are, you deserve a Purple Heart – the Harvard boys performed a little choreographed dance routine in their team van and the Internet went apesh*t for it. Admittedly, it was inspired, despite the song being cookie cutter, assembly line pop regurgitation.
Sadly, I didn’t watch my step as I turned away, and I fell into a terrible YouTube wormhole of “response” and “tribute” videos to the Crimson, and by response and tribute videos I mean terrible, blatant rip-offs. Apparently some other sports teams saw Harvard’s unique performance and successful viral video as a glove-drop and they all tried to out-do it. You know, by doing the same freaking thing.
After the jump, take a leap into the wormhole with me and watch how a meme is born and then slaughtered in a matter of days.
Thanks to an endorsement from Justin Bieber and a catchy hook straight out of Disney Channel primetime, ‘Canadian Idol’ third place finalist Carly Rae Jepsen has the “song of the summer” with 
