Nyan Cat (Yes That Forgotten Meme)

MusicBrainz Style
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Hello all,

Because I like to neglect focusing on more important things I ended up going down a repeated rabbit hole of updating, cleaning up and contributing various bits of internet culture (some people refer to it as meme culture) that relates to music content.

After stumbling through a really old (like 12 year old) playlist I made on YouTube of “silly songs I like” I found this:

Which I have since added but then came the question of attaching it to the work, that would be of course Nyan Cat right?

Well after a short journey I found that Nyan Cat is not the original work, that would be Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! written by daniwellP. Fair enough, so I then found that original and listened to it:

Now agreed, this is the original composition for the Nyan Cat we all know and love but hold on, there’s NO VOCALS. Now I’m not sure if you can say a repeated lyric of “Nyan” (or maybe just Nya?) over and over constitutes as lyrics, but it certianly means the track isn’t instrumental… so that work would be an instrumental work entity (i.e. no type + [No Lyrics]).

So then what do we do with:

This is the arguably the more “popular” variant [2.4 million views], albeit not the one which garnered views that has since left the current internet-sphere but can be viewed on WayBackMachine which at this time stamp was at a staggering 109.4 million views:

Either way they’re the same composition with an obvious lyric/vocal track.

So I then created this work:

Which then links back the original composition, and is likely going to be the base of the many parodies that came after (although I’d argue that Annoying Orange’s version here doesn’t change enough of the composition to warrant its own work entity, but we can argue about that as well).

So here’s the questions to you:

  1. Am I going absolutely mad with this?
  2. Does anyone know of any other versions that pre-date the currently identified original work
  3. Do we agree there should be a seperate entity for variants of the work that have a prominent vocal track, as the general consenous is that we are not to link recordings with lyrics to instrumental works
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Yes, keep up the good work :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’ve done a bit of work in the area, including adding a recording for the popular meme video itself

of note, it sounds like the 2nd video you shared features Hatsune Miku on vocals*, instead of Momone Momo who did the vocals on the recording used for the Nyan Cat video (the third video and the recording I linked above). from what I can tell, daniwellP did the original version and Momomomo did the version featured in the meme video (which is who I credited it to)

*compare the “Nya” sound to a track like PoPiPo (on YouTube)

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