(2) Matt and Pepe
It all started in one day in 2005. You turn around, your butt is facing me, and you bend over, yes, just don’t move. Matt said to his girlfriend Ayana.
Matt Furie
Don’t get me wrong, Matt is a cartoonist. He was drawing a scene at the time: when a person urinates, he has to take off his underwear and outer pants to his ankles. This action is difficult to draw, so I asked my girlfriend to play a cameo as a model. . .
He drew a cartoon called “Boy’s Club,” which featured four lazy young men doing nothing.
One of them had a frog head and a wise face, and it was called Pepe.
The image of Pepe comes from Matt’s cousin David. Back then, David took off his trousers and urinated like this, and he looked like a fool.
The young Matt stood outside the toilet door and witnessed all this, and was shocked. A feeling of “why is it so cool” suddenly flowed in his heart. . .So in the later comic stories, he used his cousin as the prototype and asked Pepe to say that sentence: Feels good man!
Soon, the “Boys Club” story became an instant hit online.
But the next story began to exceed Matt’s expectations.
Some people posted photos of their fitness punch cards online, accompanied by the text “Feels good man”, and then some people made various emoji packs with “Feels good man”.
There is even a silly guy who compiled a “Song of Feels good”.
Gradually, people discovered that Pepe, the frog, the appearance of cockplayer, the temperament of passers-by, and the character of having nothing but let me game the world, is just like the reflection of one’s self on the screen when it goes dark.
In the blink of an eye, people began to dress Pepe in various clothes and become various occupations, followed by various broken expressions and extreme emotions. Of course, now we know that this is a standard meme popularity process.
Ask the “consultant” sitting on the side, Mr. Andy Warhol, and he’ll raise an eyebrow — nothing new, still superimposing variables on repeating subjects.
So, you can understand it like this: Although Andy Warhol died as early as 1987, the existence of the Internet has allowed countless anonymous creators to form a “distributed Andy Warhol”. This Andy Warhol is tougher, even immortal.
This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.