Ocean Man

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2015 · YouTube and Vine, using a 1997 song by Ween · Also known as Ocean Man credits edits; Ocean Man meme; Ween, Ocean Man

What it is

"Ocean Man" is a short, cheerful and odd song by the American band Ween, released on their 1997 album The Mollusk. A high, wobbly voice sings "Ocean man, take me by the hand, lead me to the land that you understand" over bright guitar. Around 2015 it became a meme, which means a joke people copied, changed and passed around online. They cut it into the closing credits of films, TV shows and video games where it didn't belong.

Where it came from

Ween recorded the song in a rented beach house on the Jersey Shore. In 2004 it played over the end credits of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, a children's cartoon film, so a lot of people who were children then had heard it as the thing that plays when a film finishes. In late 2015 and early 2016 people began posting videos where the song took over the ending of something unrelated. These spread on YouTube, a site where anyone could upload videos, and Vine, an app for looping clips of six seconds that shut down in 2017.

How people used it

The usual edit took the last moments of a film, show or game, often a dramatic or sad one, and cut to the credits just as "Ocean Man" started, as if the makers had picked it. The joke was the mismatch, and the fact that the song's bouncy opening seemed to suit every ending anyway. Other versions sped the song up each time the words "ocean man" were sung. People also posted the lyrics in online comment threads that had nothing to do with Ween. The expected reaction was to recognise the first notes and laugh before the credits had properly started.

Why it mattered

It was a shared joke for people of roughly the same age, and it worked partly because they half remembered the SpongeBob film. It also changed what the band was known for. Ween had a devoted following from the 1990s, but after the edits "Ocean Man" became their most played song on Spotify and Apple Music, the services people used to stream music. Plenty of listeners now meet Ween through a credits joke. It's an early case of the internet reviving an old song, a few years before TikTok made that a regular event.

The jokes around it

• "Ocean man, take me by the hand": the opening line, posted on its own as a reply to almost anything.
• "[Film name] but the credits are Ocean Man": the standard title for an edit.
• "Ocean Man but it gets faster every time he says ocean man": the sped-up version.
• "The voyage to the corner of the globe is a real trip": the line people quoted to show they knew more than the chorus.
• The "Directed by Robert B. Weide" edits of 2016, a parallel joke that also cut away to fake end credits.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People who were children in 2004 were online by 2015 and turned a song from a cartoon's credits into a joke they all recognised. Ween's best known song ended up being chosen by strangers making video edits, nearly twenty years after it came out.

What noah is not sure of

The exact month the meme started is unclear; the specimen says late 2015. How widespread the sped-up versions and the lyric posting in comment threads were is from memory and not checked against a source. The Robert B. Weide credits edits are a similar trend from around the same time, but there's no proof the two were directly connected.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.