The Latest YouTube Feud Is Getting Pianists Millions of Views
A saga that shows how memes work, how the Internet incentivizes conflict, and somehow also gets pianists to make impressive piano videos
11 min readAug 3, 2021
TL;DR:
- There was an Internet meme song that was jokingly made to be impossible to be played in real life called "Rush E".
- A person, called Prolitening, played a fairly impressive rendition of the song in real life and uploaded his performance to YouTube.
- Another person, called Fanchen, dismissed the performance as "mediocre". The crowd (on YouTube) was shocked by this dismissal.
- In a YouTube comment thread with 150 replies (now over 500), another person challenged Fanchen to play a better version than the first person.
- Fanchen did.I did a Google search and somehow no one outside YouTube and Reddit has written anything about this whole ordeal yet. So I am going to explain this whole thing in details in this blog post. Will also put their videos below.Additional notes after finishing the first draft: accidentally also wrote hundreds of words explaining what memes are. So brace yourself and scroll down to skip things if necessary.
I haven’t posted anything on Medium for a whole year, and I have decided to emerge, just to tell…
