Drunk in Love

About

"Drunk in Love" is a 2013 R&B song recorded and performed by American singer-songwriter Beyoncé and her husband and rapper Jay-Z.and her husband and rapper Jay-Z. Shortly after its release in December 2013, the music video drew a lot of attention for its sexually suggestive imageries and spawned a slew of parodies on YouTube.

Origin

On December 13th, 2013, Beyoncé released her self-titled fifth studio album^[1] exclusively online via iTunes, introducing "Drunk in Love," a song marked by heavy influences of trap beats, deep bass lines and racy innuendos, as one of her two lead singles. On December 16th, the BeyonceVEVO YouTube channel uploaded the black-and-white music video for the track, which features Knowles and Jay-Z having a romantic outing at a Florida beachfront (shown below). Within the first three months, the video gained over 105 million views and 70,400 comments.

Spread

On December 25th, YouTuber DelanoTV uploaded a sexually explicit parody of the music video titled “Drunk in Nut” (shown below, left). On December 27th, YouTuber AlexisJordan1 uploaded a cover of the song, receiving more than 1.4 million views and 3,700 comments in the following five weeks (shown below, right).

On December 29th, YouTuber buffcorrell uploaded a cover in which he sings the song shirtless in his bedroom, which gathered upwards of 760,000 views and 4,500 comments in three months (shown below, left). On January 13th, 2014, YouTuber AfricanoBOI uploaded a parody titled "Horny as F*ck," in which a man wearing a dress and wig sings about being sexually aroused (shown below, right). In the next six weeks, the video gained over 320,000 views and 1,400 comments.

On January 22nd, YouTuber IceJJfish uploaded a parody version of "Drunk in Love" (shown below, left), which garnered upwards of 1.9 million views and 7,300 comments in the next three weeks. On February 25th, YouTuber Adrian Anchondo uploaded a parody version of the song in which he expresses an appreciation for the American global doughnut company Dunkin' Donuts (shown below, right). Within the first two weeks, the video accumulated over 600,000 views and 660 comments.

Notable Examples

As of July 2014, a YouTube search query for "'Drunk in Love'" and "'Parody'" yields more than 127,000 results.

"Surfbort"

In the days following the release of "Drunk in Love," many fans and critics began discussing Beyonce's repeated reference to a "surfboard" in the chorus lyrics, which was largely interpreted as a double entendre for sex, which is implicitly suggested in another line: "grainin' on that wood." However, the "surfboard" reference gained much of its online traction due to Beyonce's pronunciation of the word as something that sounds closer to "surfbort." On December 28th, YouTuber 메종메즈카 highlighted the mondegreen in a looped remix of the original music video, simply titled "surfbort" (shown below).

As the song continued to reign the charts and gain mainstream popularity throughout the first half of 2014, the joke was widely embraced by the fans and the news media, leading to creation of fan apparel and other merchandises bearing the word "surfbort." On January 12th, 2014, UrbanDictionary user Aphix2005 submitted an entry for "Surfbort," explaining that the term is a "Beyonce-ism" that been adopted as a humorous in-joke among her dedicated fans, known as the Beyhive.

Between February and March, the popularity of "surfbort" reached a new height with the launch of Soundboardt.com^[8], a web-based soundboard application featuring sampled soundbites from the song, and the single topic blog Surfbort, which curates a series of image macro parodies that wordplay on "bort" (shown below).

Sometime in mid-March, an oversized billboard advertisement featuring the hashtag #BILLBORT, stylized in the signature typeface and pink-and-black color scheme of Beyonce's album art, was unveiled in Fairfax district of Los Angeles.

Search Interest

External References