For the past 20 years or more, I have had a healthy ambivalence towards Avril Lavigne. I am not nervous about manufactured pop stars and pop songs; sometimes they are fine, they have a purpose, whatever. If I happen to be exposed to music, it might be tolerable, who knows.
But I recently learned about Avril Lavigne’s “Dolphins”, and I am totally, totally captivated.
This screenshot, unfortunately, does not include the other stellar ending to the song:
Give me a D
Give me an O
Give me an L
Give me a P
Give me an H
Give me a me
Give me an N
Wow.
Somehow, this song has been on lyrics sites since at least 2007 – except, as far as everyone knows, the music itself never existed. Ethan Chiel in Fusion I tried to analyze this situation years ago, but without success:
The summer of 2007 seems revealing: right after Lavigne’s launch The best thing, the album that included the single “Girlfriend”. Ultimately, LyricsMode offers no information about the font, only that 3,467 visits to the specific lyrics page for “Dolphins” were made. LyricsMode webmaster Oleg Kashtalyan told me via email that the Dolphins page “was added by an unregistered user to our site, so we have no information about the author and the data”.
CBC reported that some people actually tried to contact Avril Lavigne and / or his representatives for an official comment on this mysterious meme song, but to no avail.
The popular “very online” newsletter GarbageDay also investigated this phenomenon recently:
Based on a Twitter search for “dolphin avril”, the first mention I could find about the song was in 2011, when an Avril fan account seems to have automatically tweeted a Hot Lyric page for “Dolphins”. It was then mentioned once in 2012, once in 2013, and then there was other agitation of activity in it in 2015. The peak of 2015 seems to correspond to the trend of “Dolphins” on Tumblr at the same time. But the 2015 Tumblr meme references previous Tumblr posts about the song. Chiel traced the fake lyrics to the songs until at least 2007. But it could be even older. I found a Google cache that can date the song from 2005. I also looked for results in Portuguese, too, in the hypothesis that it originated in Brazil, like the theory that Avril Lavigne was secretly replaced with an actress named Melissa. However, Brazilian stans seem so confused about “Dolphins”.
Music has all the characteristics of an internal joke on a message board. I tried to search the 2007 4chan and LiveJournal files, but found nothing. I have a deep suspicion that it started on a fan panel, but I can’t prove it. So, unfortunately, Avril Lavigne’s “Dolphins” will remain a mystery.
There are some versions of covers of music fans on YouTube, but it is technically a “cover song” if the song isn’t it real in the first place?
And that is perhaps why I am so fascinated by “Dolphins”. It is a perfect manifestation of the wholesome absurdity of the Internet. Some bored teenager probably thought he was being funny in 2007 when he added the lyrics to LyricsMode, a rather banal blow to the general blandness of pop music. OK Alright. But this gag took on a life of its own – a meme in Richard Dawkins’ original sense of a viral idea that perpetuates his own existence through culture, the survival mechanism of pure thinking. 14 years later – probably twice the life of the original prankster! – and it still thrives, transforming itself into its own art form, as evidenced by YouTube’s “covers”. Now, fake music is actually real music. He literally wished to exist. Because ideas have power, so you must be careful with those that you let in your head, so that they do not come to life as covers of songs that do not exist on YouTube or protagonists of a comic by Grant Morrison.
But I may be thinking about it too much. It may just be a symptom of the Mandela Effect. Or worse, it could be a depressing charge about how misinformation never really goes away, and how virality, even as a joke, can still take on a life of its own, until it manifests itself in reality. As well as a political rumor: if you keep insisting that Avril Lavigne’s Song of the Dolphins is real, enough people will come to believe it, and that’s all you need.
In other words, the dolphins are you. Dolphins are me. Dolphins are all people who include you and me.
Image via Wikimedia Commons and Pexels (changed)