Turi ip ip ip
TL;DR · Origin"Turi Ip Ip Ip" is a meme built on writing down misheard song lyrics exactly as they sound and captioning them onscreen. English has a word for this kind of mishearing — a mo…
Origin
"Turi Ip Ip Ip" is a meme built on writing down misheard song lyrics exactly as they sound and captioning them onscreen. English has a word for this kind of mishearing — a mondegreen — and this meme is one of the format's best-known cases.
The track is "Symbolism" by the electronic artist Electro-Light, uploaded to the NoCopyrightSounds (NCS) channel on November 27th, 2014. NCS distributes music that creators can use without copyright concerns, so the song had already circulated widely as background music in gaming and edit videos and was familiar to many ears.
The meme itself began seven and a half years later, on May 12th, 2022, when TikTok user @cappeman1 posted a video placing the phonetically transcribed lyric "turi ip ip ip" in a speech bubble over a rotating series of dog photos. The video drew 6.6 million views in three weeks, and the same sound was used in over 4,000 videos in that span.
Format and Spread
The format is extremely simple: play the track, put the phonetic lyric in a speech bubble, and attach the bubble to any subject at all. As long as the subject appears to be singing, no editing skill and no knowledge of the original song is required. That low barrier is why it spread as fast as it did.
The examples show how quickly the subject matter widened. On May 20th, 2022 @stoopy_miku posted a version swapping dogs for fish that passed 2 million views; on May 27th a lyric video on YouTube reached 271,000 views. On May 29th SubToMe's mashup framing the audio as a Breaking Bad rap battle passed 770,000 views, and on May 30th the channel Lessons In Meme Culture posted an explainer that drew 297,000 views — an explainer video existed within three weeks of the meme's birth.
Lineage
The format belongs to the same family as "Wenomechainsama." What the original lyrics actually are does not matter; it's arguably better that nobody knows for certain. When sound that can't be parsed is transcribed by ear, everyone produces a slightly different spelling, and the more ridiculous the spelling, the better the meme works.
How It's Used
- Comments sharing a lyric you've been mishearing
- Video edits making an animal or character appear to sing
- Imitating speech or sound you genuinely can't make out
- Reactions to any video running an NCS-style track underneath
