You Spin Me Round

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About

You Spin Me Round is a popular song by 80s dance-rock band Dead or Alive. The track later became a popular YTMND fad and has maintained a strong presence in pop culture.

Origin

"You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" is a song by Dead or Alive on their 1985 album Youthquake.

Released in November 1984, the record reached number one on the UK Singles Chart in March 1985. In the US, it peaked at #11 in September of the same year.

Spread

The first YTMND iteration of the meme, You Spin Me Right Round Baby [1] was created by user dmorgendorffer on May 9th, 2004. It wasn't until July 26th, 2004 that user Kihei brought up the idea to use the lyric as a pun, adding a looped animation of a character spinning. The result was YOU SPIN ME RIGHT ROUND BABY.^[2] The first instance of the fad had only 1500 views. In a manner not dissimilar to the What Is Love? meme, the first instance was not the most influential in spreading the meme that eventually resulted in more than 400 YTMND occurances on the same theme. The following is a list of the most popular instances of the meme, sorted by views:

Homer spinning right round (over 37,000 views)
Kirby ASCII spinning (over 32,000 views)
You spin Mr.bean right round (over 25,000 views)
Naruto spins right round (over 22,000 views)
Diablo II's Barbarian spin (over 22,000 views)

Meatspin affiliation

In March of 2005, the shock site Meatspin.com was launched, showing homosexual porn set to the song.

On YouTube

Following the YTMND trend, the track migrated to YouTube. One of the earliest instances is from March 4th, 2007 with "L Spins random XP, in which the song is used to a loop version of the Death Note scene in which L spins on a chair. The video has since been deleted. However, in the late 2000s, there were multiple loops posted to YouTube using the song. YouTube user Lanipator, well-known for his works on the Abridged Series, also used the literal spinning paired with the song in his "Yusuke spin" video on January 3rd, 2008.

Many of these videos feature spinning moves from various video games, while others included popular cartoons and anime.

Fallon Parody

On April 25th, 2019, Jimmy Fallon and actor Paul Rudd recreated the original music video. The video has gained over 8.6 million views on YouTube (shown below).