A few months ago, hip hop and high-fiber fruit might have seemed incongrous, but the internet has forever altered the thugfruit narrative with #shoutouttoallthepear. Here’s a refresher on how an offhand comment from Rick Ross went viral and ended up on the virtual pages of the Guardian and the Washington Post.
The Interview
On May 21, British TV presenter Tim Westwood interviewed Rick Ross backstage at his London show. When the pair got chatting about the rapper’s weightloss, he revealed that in addition to his Rossfit workout routine, he’s made dietary changes too: “I forgot what fruit tasted like. I eat pears now and shit like that.” The shirtless rapper then looks into the camera and says the line that launched a thousand vines: “Shout out to all the pear.”
The Vine
On October 18, Vine user Willyjoy posted this clip. It’s been looped more than 25.5 million times.
The Meme
The internet did it’s thing. There were vines.
There were tweets.
https://twitter.com/RickRossPear/status/534532037974429697
https://twitter.com/chimairamark/status/535800873973465088
https://twitter.com/Krazygio/status/535568597188612097
There were Instagrams.
A photo posted by Berto Villaescusa (@bert_mcfly_dabarber) on Dec 12, 2014 at 11:41pm PST
#shoutouttoallthepear
A photo posted by Τλθγ (@troy_bell_87) on Dec 12, 2014 at 2:28am PST
The Media
Less than one month after the initial Vine, Buzzfeed posted a compilation of pear-related parodies. Gawker reported that Ross’s Instagram feed was basically just a series of pear emoji. And Modern Farmer came out with an intelligent analysis of whether the meme would affect domestic pear sales (the conclusion: dollarwise it hasn’t made much of a dent, but the marketing is priceless), which was picked up by everyone from Spin to the Washington Post.
And that’s how the pear became the #pear, boys and girls.