Tweens confused by Millennials’ obsession with the month of May

If you’ve been on the internet for any period of time, you’ve noticed that a large swath of Millennials engage in an annual ritual of posting Justin Timberlake memes toward the end of April. It’s a phenomenon that has left many young people confused about this generation’s obsession with the fifth month of the year.

The meme was created in a Tumblr post back in 2012 and immediately caught the attention of *NSYNC fans around the world for creatively using the boy band’s infliction on the word “me”, which sounds like “May”, from their hit 2000 song “It’s Gonna be Me.”

“You know what I’ve never had to worry about? Knowing when it’s about to be May,” said Victoria Blount, 15. “My mom’s Facebook feed is full of those memes that her friends post and every time she sees one, she always does that same, stupid joke—she tries to sing the words, ‘it’s gonna be May’, but she always looks and sounds like she’s having a stroke when she hits that last word.”

Of course, most Millennials are not obsessed with the month of May, they just appreciate the nostalgia this meme generates. It reminds them of running home from school to watch Carson Daly host TRL (Total Request Live) and to see if their favorite song made it into the top 10. It reminds them of a period of their life before 9/11 and watching the world plummet into the proverbial Hell in a handbasket. And it’s a reminder that you can take a moment to be silly and that life doesn’t always have to be taken so seriously.

But why do they pronounce the world like they do?

In a 2023 interview with Hot Ones, the popular YouTube celebrity interview show where guests eat a gauntlet of increasingly spicy hot wings while answering questions, Timberlake talked about the viral meme and why the group decided to pronounce the word me like they do in the song.

Max Martin, Andreas Carlsson, and Rami Yacoub, the producers of the songwriters for It’s Gonna Be Me, told Timberlake to sing “May”, which the band admits could’ve been due, in part, to the fact these gentlemen as Swedish and spoke English with an accent. However, they didn’t question the songwriters’ decision because they believed the accent helped make their songs more vibrant.

“What’s funny specifically to Max Martin is, the parts of their English that were broken actually made them catchier songwriters because they would put words in a way that almost didn’t make sense, but when you sang them, they were more memorable,” Timberlake said. “But yes, it was a specific note and I did it the way he requested and that’s what made the record.”

Aside from becoming a viral meme many years later, the song was a certified success. It reached the top of the Billboard 100 on July 29, 2000, and remained in the number one spot for two weeks. However, despite the song’s enormous popularity at the time of its release, the prolonged use of the meme has done little to enshrine Timberlake—or the rest of *NSYNC—in the minds of today’s youth who aren’t fortunate to have parents cultured enough to share this banger with their kids.

“I saw a recent picture of the guy in the meme and he’s pretty cute for an old guy,” said Kimberly Fuchs, 14. “But, like, I kinda feel bad for him. I mean, imagine your only claim to fame is being the face of a meme for a cult of old-timers obsessed with a month. He should do TikTok or something.”

Of course, the meme has outlived most of its contemporaries, as a typical meme only has a lifespan of about four months, according to meme lords across the Reddit-sphere. And the life expectancy of new memes appears to be on an unfortunate downward trend. Experts believe this is due, in part, to the introduction and popularity of short form content which degrades a person’s attention span. Others, like Gabe Woodcock, believe the meme is a lost art form.

“Millennials were extremely fortunate to grow up in a time of meme renaissance,” said Woodcock, 38. “We had Condescending Wonka, Squinting Fry, Evil Kermit, and of course, It’s Gonna Be May. These memes have persisted over the years because they are art, simple as that. What memes do kids have these days? I don’t even know; they’re popular for a few days and then are forgotten about. It’s sad, really.”

Woodcock also said he thinks the introduction of generative artificial intelligence is in part to blame as people are no longer taking the time to appreciate pop culture for its meme-worthiness and just generating images that don’t have a very long internet shelf life. “To paraphrase the Narrator from Fight Club, these images are single serve memes.”

Not all is lost, however. It seems that as long as Millennials have Facebook, memes will continue to thrive. Especially those from 20+ year old boy band songs, regardless of how cringe the kids these days think they are.

Let us know what your favorite memes are in the comments.

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