How memes gave The Presidents Of The United States Of America’s “Peaches” new life
The unusual 1996 hit has recently resurfaced with a wave of memes. Here’s why.
Music Features Peaches
@WorstIGAccount Even before memes were a mainstream form of communication, The Presidents Of The United States Of America and their debut self-titled album had all the makings of a viral success. That first record was loaded with pop-punk earworms filled with absurd lyrics that fans—and listeners who overheard the songs on the radio—ate up. Between the band’s bizarre style and the subsequent music video for “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Gump” (a parody of PUSA’s “Lump”), the group was a hit—at my elementary school, at least. On any summer day in 1996, you could hear a school bus full of kids on the way to a soccer game screaming the album’s most famous refrain: “Millions of peaches / Peaches for me.” Not everyone got it, though: Entertainment Weekly called the album “a turgid amalgam of Fugazi and Green Day [that] lacks both the muscle and tunefulness of its forerunners.” It’s not entirely wrong. PUSA bears similarities to both those bands, but their bass-heavy guitar stylings lean heavier on Primus, while the lyrics are straight-up They Might Be Giants. Nevertheless, it’s the playfulness that adolescents from the era likely still remember. Had the track come out today, it would’ve been all over social media; instead, nostalgia for the song is.
It took a while, but in late May, PUSA went viral when filmmaker Jessica Ellis tweeted, “A good way to tell elder millennials from younger ones is to shriek-sing ‘PEACHES COME FROM A CAN’ at them and see what happens.” Ellis tapped into something primal for “geriatric millennials,” as the age group of people in their late 30s and early 40s have recently (and unfortunately) been dubbed. “Peaches come from a can”—and the followup lyric, “they were put there by a man”—went from obscure bite of ’90s nostalgia to trending meme within hours.
“Peaches” may not be a perfect song, but it is memorable. What’s more, it possesses the ideal elements to become a potent meme—and boy, was “Peaches” meme’d. Dr. Shane Tilton, an associate professor of writing and multimedia studies at Ohio Northern University and author of the upcoming book Meme Life, attributes pop music’s prevalence in memes to four strengths: formula, performance, meaning, and social experience. “Most [pop songs] are built on a formula,” says Tilton. “They’re time-constrained. They tend to have the same types of chords and musical construction. It is something that is easy to pull apart.” Deconstructing bits of culture and mixing them with others is crucial to internet mashups. The more easily netizens can break them down, the more quickly they spread. Not only is “Peaches” a very tightly written song, but its lyrics leave the door wide open for visual media. How hard is it to Google a can of peaches?
But a meme has to mean something to an audience—even non-sequiturs must make contextual sense to get any shares. As Tilton says, pop songs hold sensory significance, evoking a place and time for the listener. “I can tell you where I was the first time I heard ‘Closing Time’ by Semisonic. The song has some kind of embedded meaning to me. Every time I hear it, I sort of remember where I was.” Through memes, fans communicate that transportive quality, allowing followers to convey that “summer of ’96" vibe. “You’re trying to communicate that feeling,” says Tilton. “You’re trying to communicate something that you experienced, and the song is the closest way of expressing that meaning that an audience might understand.”
Nostalgia is a significant theme in memes, but it’s how they communicate that feeling that matters. This lines up closely with what Ellis says. “I’ve loved the song since I was a teenager. It came out when I was 13,” Ellis told The A.V. Club over Twitter. “I’ve always associated [it] with that particular era of mid-’90s music that was very abstract lyrically and had a harder alt-rock edge that made very uncool people like me feel very cool.” Her tweet also touches on another of Tilton’s strengths: Pop songs are performative, and fit perfectly into Twitter prompts like Ellis’ tweet. Tilton says that it reminds him of the long-running inhaling seagull format, an image macro that exhibits the feeling of screaming a favorite song. “When you hear the first lyrics, you can scream them out,” he says. “Pop songs are built that way. They’re built to be easily accessible to an audience, and they’re built to be sung. That screaming bird isn’t really that different from performing the song at karaoke.”
It’s common for these types of resurgences to happen around pop songs, particularly ones that are so tied to a place and time. Late last year, fellow mid-’90s pop-punkers Eve 6 and their famed “heart in a blender” song (“Inside Out”) became internet fodder, helping their self-deprecating singer become a Twitter celebrity in the process. Regardless of genre, idiosyncratic lyrics (like “heart in a blender” or “Peaches come from a can / They were put there by a man”) make for good memes. Doja Cat had her first big hit with “Mooo!” a song where she dreams of being a cow. After the track’s release, image formats similar to the inhaling seagull, like “Turn Up The Volume,” were captioned with “Bitch I’m a cow. I’m not a cat. I don’t meow.” Fans taking their love of absurd lyrics and imbuing them with meaning allows them to laugh at the song and themselves while also asking their audience if they feel the same way.
This returns us to Tilton’s final classification of meme strength: Memes are a social experience. When people share a tweet like Ellis’ or a Justin Timberlake “It’s Gonna Be May” post, they aren’t just sharing their appreciation of the song—they are helping to solidify and change the meaning of the song. To someone who has never heard “Peaches” and doesn’t share in that nostalgia, the song’s lyrics become an expression of joy—transforming the meme and what it communicates. For example, when TikToker Nathan Apodaca’s video, which featured himself skateboarding on a highway while sipping some Ocean Spray and lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” there was a two-pronged effect. The song re-entered the Billboard charts, buoyed by listeners old and new. It also changed the meaning that many associate with “Dreams”: What used to be a song about a breakup is now one about liberation, a carefree vibe that thousands were ready to share in their own way.
Many of the songs on The Presidents Of The United States Of America have similar potential. Maybe the album’s other hit single, “Lump,” would’ve inspired remixes, had America Online been a bit more robust when “Weird Al” first released “Gump.” The opener, “Kitty,” which turns on the finicky relationship between man and cat, features a chorus of meows that sits nicely alongside “Mooo!” as a silly novelty song that scratches online culture’s itch for absurdity. (To say nothing of how the internet’s obsession with the mysteriously malevolent mind of the cat makes the song a perfect fit for social-media consumption.) But there’s something about “Peaches.” Maybe it’s the interest the internet, in general, has with the fruit, whether it be in emoji form or a scene from Call Me By Your Name. Moreover, it’s such an evocative song that crafting a post doesn’t require much mental flexing.
By taking the alt-rock formulas of the time and loading them with absurdity, The Presidents Of The United States Of America were able to ensure their immortality, both in the hearts of older millennials and online. “For a meme to be successful, it has to be derivative. There are thousands of pop songs that have been produced, and very few get that second life,” says Tilton. “The reason is that there’s something unique or there’s something different that sparks the interest of an audience or a content creator.” “Peaches” may be a frivolous little pop song, but its magic is in its bizarre details, a specific feeling it conjures that only it can provide. “It’s a very weird song,” says Ellis. “You shouldn’t be able to rock out so hard on the chorus as you are singing about stone fruit, but you do, and that silliness is so much fun. You don’t sing that song; you shriek it.” And when you can’t shriek, you meme.
53 Comments
Younger GenXers are gonna know that too.Source: I’m a younger GenXer.
Pretty sure anyone who listened to rock radio during the 90’s would know it, including my dad who is a “young” boomer.
Hi, daughter/son.
Nice try, but internet commenting is not something my father would do. Did you also father your first child (me) at age 19 in the early 80’s?
Yeah I’m a tail end Generation X so a lot of these 90s kids, only old Millenials understand Memes I relate to.
Geriatric Millennial here. I know it.
I’m the eldest of elder Millenials (born first week of January 1981), and can confirm this album and song were high school mainstays.
I love the Presidents of the United States and “Peaches” in specific, but it’s got nothing on King Missile’s “Detachable Penis” when it comes to ridiculous, fun 90s songs.
You can really confuse the young’ins by telling them a band named “Butthole Surfers” had a hit in the 90’s.
Man, I love “Pepper” but they made a goddamned weird version of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man.”
Not to mention their bonkers version of the Underdog theme song.
I’m still so mad that Spotify doesn’t have all of the songs from the album this is from. Saturday Morning Cartoons was played all the time in my household as a kid.
That was pretty much the whole point to the BH Surfers, so mission accomplished I figure.I have a real appreciation for their version of twisted anyways.
I love their version of Hurdy Gurdy Man
“I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas” is still one of my favorite song names.
There’s a great story where Clay Tarver of Chavez is driving his kids around, and they start giggling and they say ‘Dad, did you know there was a band called the Butthole Surfers?’ and he was like, ‘Uh, yeah, we used to play together!”
I’ve seen things you Zoomers wouldn’t believe. Buttholes surfed off the shoulder of Lallapalooza. I watched Winona’s big brown beaver glitter in the dark near the Oz fest Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like a detachable penis in rain. Time to die.
My classmate in high school desperately tried to connect a butthole surfers song to a poem for an assignment in English. Simply so he could get away with carrying a large poster with “Butthole Surfers” written on it for the entire day.
I can hear the reverb after reading your comment.
Now I’m suddenly hungry for cheesecake.
It was so mind-blowing to hear this song on 120 Minutes back in the day. The next year, KM opened for Violent Femmes at my local college, and 16-year-old me and my buddies ended up in the pit (?) and then crowd-surfed during ‘Martin Scorcese’.
That’s not even the best King Missile song
He wanted 22 bucks, but I talked him down to 17…
NINJAS!!!!
I don’t know if I ever actually heard the song, I’m mostly familiar with Hank Hill singing it on King of the Hill not knowing what it was.
“Peaches” may not be a perfect song BLASPHEMY!!!
I mean, if it isn’t it’s just because only Mach 5 can be.
PUSA
Um, what? The correct acronym (as any 90’s teen could tell you) is POTUSA.
Don’t poo poo on my PUPUSA
I dunno, I always referred to them as PUSA back in the 90s. Never heard them referred to as ‘POTUSA’.Different crowds, I suppose.
Scrolled down to post this.
Thank you.
I had official merch (a T-shirt) from a concert that clearly said PUSA.
Came for this, all the mag and (rare) Internet references I remember were the PotUSA variety.
I always was more deferential to The Stranglers’ “Peaches”. But the kids nowadays would not get the more subtle and obvious humor and satire and get offended at taking it at face value.
Yes, kids (which I assume you define as anyone even slightly younger than yourself) are really incapable of understanding subtle humor these days. Or, uh, obvious humor. Also, “deferential”?Do words better.
All your base are belong to us.
Well they certainly launched your every zig.
You can probably change this to “How memes gave (INSERT THING HERE) new life” and cut down on 40% of your content output.
How MEMES gave ALL CAPS new LIFE
Or if you’re just old, this is the more perfect peaches song.
“Blow up your TV
Throw away your paper
Go to the country
Build you a home
Plant a little garden
Eat a lot of peaches
Try an’ find Jesus on your own”
I’m 35 and what is this
This is also a better Peaches song (Teaches of Peaches, not about peaches).
Another reminder than I need to drop back into the Prine catalogue! Thanks
This song never died for me. Locally in Southern Ontario they have the Winona Peach Festival for decades. Let’s say that song gets a lot of airplay when you go there. Peach Sundaes are awesome!
“Peaches” is a wonderful tune, although I’m also partial to “Boll Weevil”. I associate these guys with summer of ‘95, just because that’s when “Feather Pluckn” showed up on the CD in the CMJ New Music Monthly.Also, please, “geriatric millennials” is an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp” or “Congressional ethics committee”. Xennials is, well, slightly less bad.
If you like Presidents’ of the United States of America’s irreverent humour and you have young kids, you owe yourself to listen to Ballew’s output as Casper Babypants.
Am I the only one that doesn’t understand what the meme even is here. Something about yelling “peaches in a can, put their by the man”. I mean I know the song and the lyrics, I just don’t get the joke. Similar to the whole “You got Wheezered” thing the other day.
I think young’ins just find the 90s infinitely hilarious.
Always loved the drummer from PUSA. He had such fantastic sound and feel on that first album. Nothing flashy at all, but he knew exactly where to place a beat.
He played a super simple kit, too, which I admired.
Here’s a goddamn musical-generational litmus test for yaQUESTIONS OF A THOUSAND DREAMSor maybeALL THE COPS IN THE DOUGHNUT SHOP SAY
what comes next?
The Presidents’ debut album is a very underrated gem of a record, this geriatric millennial is telling you. I’d like to add Dune Buggy to the list of absolute genius pieces of music from that record.