TikTok's "Fancy Pants McGee" Trend Reinvigorated a Deleted Twitter Thread
Everyone is posting videos to the country song with the line, “Fancy Pants McGee over here,” but it isn't what it seems.
May 28 2024, Published 12:10 p.m. ET
Musical artists often use TikTok as a way to share their songs and get more fans through viral trends that use their songs. This happened with artists like Noah Kahan, Olivia Rodrigo, Ice Spice, and many more who are now household names. But it’s rare for a song to become the center of a trend when the song doesn’t actually have an artist.
We are officially in the future where content created by AI has become more popular than content created by real human beings. A song with the lyric, “Fancy Pants McGee over here,” has started circulating on TikTok. Creators are making video memes to joke about aspects of life that aren’t “fancy” per se, but are definitely better than a first option. But where did the song and trend come from?
A TikTok trend references a song lyric, “Fancy pants McGee over here.”
The “Fancy Pants” TikTok trend refers to a country song that was first shared on the Chat Music account, although the viral bit of the song is just the lyrics, “How the hell you spell showfer? Chauffeur. Oooo fancy pants rich McGee over here f--k you.” Clips have reshared this 11-second snippet of the song with their own versions of the interaction.
For example, TikToker Brooke Monk totally gets it. In one video, she plays the two characters of the song as someone who did bad on a test and someone who thinks they did bad on a test but actually got a 91. The person who did poorly sings back, “Fancy pants rich McGee over here, f--k you” as she got a 37 on the test.
Basically, TikTokers are mapping other real-life situations over the lyrics of the strange country song and using it all over the app to point out common discrepancies in reality, like the different amounts of time it takes for girls to straighten their hair or breathing during panic attacks. While many of us may know how to spell “chauffeur,” the relatability of the lyrics will never go out of style.
The “Fancy pants McGee over here” lyric comes from an AI-generated song based on a Twitter exchange.
When following the song back to its original sound, we’re brought to the TikTok page, Chat Music, which creates AI-generated songs based on exchanges shared on the internet. The “Fancy pants McGee” song pulls from several different conversations, starting with an iMessage exchange about someone’s Grandma ending up in the hospital and going into the viral “How the hell you spell showfer” Twitter exchange.
The exchange itself, however, is no longer on Twitter. It was between two accounts now named @skeezerrs and @CumShiesty, although they had different names at the time. Thanks to some digging by author Hank Green, a Twitter sleuth found their new accounts, although little is known about the people behind the lyrics. In fact, almost nothing is known about whoever created the AI-song-generating account.
But whoever does run the account is also running a merch e-commerce site called “Hall of Memes,” which sells shirts with memes on them to the masses. It’s about time we got a “Fancy pants McGee” shirt in the store since it’s now arguably their most popular meme. Hopefully, we’ll find out more about the creators, but for now, we’re just going to send them love for making something different and weird.
