Bag Raiders Are Chuffed ‘Shooting Stars’ Is A Meme, But Have No Clue Why

In this, the 2017th year of our lord and saviour Beyoncé, internet virality by means of being made into a meme can be a double-edged sword (so… like most swords I guess, or maybe the second edge is down where you put your hands? IDK, metaphors are weird).

Careers can be launched, amplified or, more often than not, torpedoed into smithereens all due to a well-spun meme, but what’s it like when you’ve been an established music artist for the better part of a decade and an eight-year-old song of yours enters the meme-o-sphere for, ostensibly, no fucking reason whatsoever?
This is a particularly modern conundrum currently being faced by L.A. via Sydney producer duo Bag Raiders, whose 2009 dancefloor filler ‘Shooting Stars‘ has felt the boon of internet attention in the past few weeks, featuring in an inscrutable, yet inarguably hilarious new meme.
Taking a break from making tunes in their L.A. studio, Bag Raiders’ Chris Stacey spoke to P.TV about the moment they first noticed shit was going down online:


We had seen a couple of videos I guess, but not a lot at first. There were a couple of times people had made videos that we saw but it’s only really lately people started tagging us in things and we discovered it all. Past two weeks is when it’s been really massive. 


At first we were like, ok this is funny I guess, but I didn’t really get it so I thought “alright whatever”. Once I started seeing a common theme though, such as the big guy jumping off the bridge into the river, that was the first one of the more recent stuff that really got me. So good! That and the Lady Gaga one is so funny.

In proper Aussie fashion, Chris says the pair have been taking it all in stride and trying not to scrutinise the whole thing, although as with any solid meme, it’s almost impossible to truly understand what the actual fuck is the main theme of the whole thing. Is it simply just pairing the song’s drop with people flying through technicolour space?:


Yeh that seems to be the thread. People falling and then flying off into weird stock footage of space and… oh man it’s so weird. And the thing with the underwater and the fish tanks and Spongebob keeps popping up? Man I don’t know. Even just explaining what a meme is… like “So there’s this whole thing on this thing that didn’t really exist five years ago, but imagine it like people inventing their own postcards. Imagine if people just printed out their own postcards but they did it a rate of like a million a day.”

Whilst he admits that being the internet’s new toy has boosted ‘Shooting Stars’ up a few spots on Spotify and the like, the guys are just chuffed that new people are discovering a song which holds a special place in not only Bag Raiders’ history, but the hearts and minds of many Aussies who, possibly like this writer, remember it as the soundtrack to a pleasurably misspent youth.

“The internet is a weird and wonderful place and you can’t try to control it. It’s pretty cool that people who have never heard the song are now going “what’s this song?”. Like someone commented after the Lady Gaga video saying “what is this music, this is better than anything I’ve heard lately” so that’s nice that people that probably would never have discovered us otherwise have now.
 


Lots of people tell us that that song has a special place for them and that kind of thing. It’s really quite nice when people come up and say “me and my girlfriend fell in love to that song”. So [there are] others are that maybe have forgotten about it are now remembering it. It’s all just totally weird and very of this time.”

As for the future of the ‘Shooting Stars’ meme, Chris reckons the boys will leave it to the meme lords to look after, with no plans of incorporating it into their show or the like:


We’ll let it have its space on the internet, yeah. I don’t know about like, suspending ourselves from bungee cords and like having some crazy projections… haha I don’t know about that.

At least we’ll always have the memes. *kisses laptop screen*

 
Photo: Facebook / Bag Raiders.

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