For the past twenty years I have had a healthy ambivalence towards Avril Lavigne. I don’t get excited about manufactured pop stars and pop songs; sometimes it’s good, they have a purpose, whatever. If I happen to be exposed to the music, it might be tolerant, who knows.
But I recently learned about the Avril Lavigne song ‘Dolphins’ and I was completely captivated.
The screenshot unfortunately does not contain the song’s star outro:
Give me a D
Give me an O
Give me an L
Give me a P
Give me an H
Give me an ego
Give me an N
Wow.
Somehow this song has been around since at least 2007 on lyric sites – except, as far as anyone knows, the song itself has never really existed. Ethan Chiel aan Merger tried to investigate this situation years ago, but in vain:
The summer of 2007 looks telling: it’s right after Lavigne’s release The best damn thing, the album containing the single “Girlfriend”. LyricsMode finally provides no information about the source, only 3,467 visits to a specific lyric page “Dolphins” were done. LyricsMode’s webmaster, Oleg Kashtalyan, emailed me that the Dolphins page “was added by unregistered users to our site, so we have no author and data information.”
The CBC reported that some people did try to contact Avril Lavigne and / or her representatives for an official comment on this mysterious meme song, but to no avail.
The popular “very online” newsletter GarbageDay also recently investigated this phenomenon:
Based on a Twitter search for ‘dolphin avril’, was the earliest mention I could find of the song, from 2011, when an Avril fan apparently automatically tweeted A Hot Lyric page for “Dolphins”. It was once called in 2012, once in 2013, and then there was another wave of activity in it in 2015. The 2015 peak seems to coincide with “Dolphins” trending on Tumblr at the same time. But the 2015 Tumblr meme refers to previous Tumblr posts about the song. Chiel traced the fake lyrics back to at least 2007. But it could be even older. I found a google box that can date the song to 2005. I also searched for Portuguese results, if they probably originated in Brazil, such as the theory that Avril Lavigne was secretly replaced with an actress named Melissa. Although, Brazilian stance seems just so confused about “Dolphins”.
The song contains all the features of a message board in the joke. I have been trying to search 4chan and LiveJournal archives since 2007 but found nothing. I have this deep suspicion that it started on a fan board, but I can not prove it. Unfortunately, Avril Lavigne’s “Dolphins” will remain a mystery.
There are some versions of the song’s fans on YouTube, but it’s even technically a ‘cover song’ if the song is is it not really in the first place?
And that’s maybe why I’m so fascinated by ‘Dolphins’. This is a perfect manifestation of wholesome absurdity on the internet. Some bored teens probably thought they were funny in 2007 when they added the lyrics to LyricsMode, a bit of a nod to the overall poplessness of pop music. All right, all right. But that gag has taken on a life of its own – a meme in the original Richard Dawkins sense of a viral idea that perpetuates its own existence through culture, the survival mechanism of a pure thought. 14 years later – probably twice the life of the original comedian! – and it continues to thrive and change into its own art form, as evidenced by the YouTube cover. The fake song is actually a real song. It literally wants to establish itself. Because ideas have power, you need to be careful not to let your head go in so that they do not come to life as a YouTube cover of non-existent songs, or as the protagonist of a Grant Morrison comic book.
But I might be thinking about it. It may just be a symptom of the Mandela effect. Or worse, it can be a depressing accusation about how disinformation never really disappears, and how virality, even as a joke, can still take on a life of its own until it manifests in reality. Just like a political rumor: if you keep insisting that the Avril Lavigne Dolphin Song is genuine, enough people will eventually believe it, and that’s all you need.
In other words, Dolphins are you. Dolphins I am. Dolphins are all that you and I include.
Image via Wikimedia Commons and Pexels (alter)