"Blue (Da Ba Dee)", commonly known as "I'm Blue" is a song that is best known for being a meme.
Description[]
"Blue (Da Ba Dee)" was composed by Italian band Eiffel 65. It is the lead single of their debut album Europop. The song is the group's most popular single, reaching number one in many countries such as Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand, Finland, Norway, Australia, Germany and Hungary, as well as reaching number six on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States.
In the United Kingdom, the song originally entered the top 40 purely on import sales; it was only the third single to do this. The song also received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Dance Recording at the 2001 Grammy Awards, 2 years after it was released.
History[]
Origins[]
"Blue (Da Ba Dee)" was written by Eiffel 65 lead singer Jeffrey Jey, keyboardist Maurizio Lobina, and producer Massimo Gabutti. It was recorded in September 1998 and released in October of the same year. It was know for Underground Warriors, was inspired by group member Maurizio Lobina's composed opening piano hook. The producers of the song then came up with the idea for a dance song. Jey stated that his inspiration for the lyrics was how a person picked his lifestyle. The colour blue as the main topic of the song was picked at random, with Lobina telling him to write nonsensical lyrics. "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" is one of the first hit songs to use the Auto-Tune vocal warble effect, after Cher's "Believe" and Kid Rock's "Only God Knows Why". Lobina came up with the "da ba dee" hook at the end of this line.
The song received mixed reviews from critics. Entertainment Weekly positively reviewed the song, calling the song "a fleeting, feel-good foot-tapper" and gave the song a rating of B-. PopMatters reviewer Chris Massey, in his review of Europop, described his initial reaction to the song as being "really, really bad." However, he later stated in the review that after many repeated listenings of the song he "loved it."
Rolling Stone, however, in their review of Europop, gave the song a negative review, stating that the song "blends Cher-esque vocoder vocals, trance-like synth riffs, unabashed Eurodisco beats and a baby-babble chorus so infantile it makes the Teletubbies sound like Shakespeare." The magazine also placed the song on their list of the "20 Most Annoying Songs," at No. 14.
Spread[]
On July 21, 2008, YouTube user malawolf85 posted a simple video using the song and a single image. The video has since gotten over 5,000,000 views (5,468,244 as of July 25, 2011), and is considered by many to be the video that kick-started the meme.
However, in the previous year, user Pikachu1391 uploaded a video called "Sonic and Friends Sing 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)' ". This video was also quite popular, snatching over 1,552,000 views so far. Other people say this was the video that started it.
Other people say it was EOPkers' video "Im Blue – Runescape Style – With Lyrics". It has around 2,000 views. Most people dismiss this as the origin, because of the relative unpopularity. The origins are actually rather untraceable, as there are over 1,400 deviations of it on YouTube alone. Some variants include these:
- "Eiffel 65 Im Blue (Techno Remix)" by CryptoJunkie
- "Spongebob sings I'm blue" by thanos134ever
- "Gummy bear i'm blue" by jhnhlh
- "I'm Blue (Da Ba Dee) Shark" by craZelz
- "Gottam 65 - Im Blu (Gottam Gottam)" by TheNubCupCake
"Blue (Da Ba Dee)" was commonly used with other memes and inspired a lot of YouTube Poop videos in the late 2010s.