What could English actor Tom Holland, star of the most recent Spider-Man film saga, and Caifanes, one of the rock bands that generated a boom in the music scene during the eighties and nineties in Mexico, have in common? ? Nothing.
Or, maybe yes; but to express it in terms more akin to fans of the character created by Stan Lee, perhaps the point in common between Zendaya ‘s boyfriend and the group led by Saúl Hernández is that they exist in the same universe, although there is a geographical abyss between them and insurmountable generational.
Suffice it to mention that when Tom Holland was born on June 1, 1996, Caifanes had already released his last studio album, El Nerve del Volcan for two years, which meant the end of the band in its original stage. However, it is precisely there where the internet worked its magic and, as has happened with other unconnected characters, themes, moments, and situations, in the case of Tom Holland and Caifanes it also gave rise to a strange coincidence.
In recent days, an image went viral on social networks and on different electronic media in which actor Tom Holland is seen with his hair grown on a mount in the shape of a deer while holding a cigarette on his lips and wearing a cherry-colored T-shirt with the logo of the rock band Caifanes in white printed on the front of the garment.
As happens in these situations, in which a public figure outside the context of Mexican pop culture shows his fondness or closeness to some element of the national collective imagination, Tom’s photo began to generate a debate not only because of its veracity but because of imagining what would have to have happened for a shirt of the Mexican band that had its moment of glory in the nineties to have reached the hands of a Hollywood superstar.
The Tom Holland meme and the Caifanes t-shirt
The comments, mostly posted on Twitter, ranged from the innocent voice of a user asking if the image of Tom Holland smoking a cigarette and wearing a Caifanes shirt was real or fake, to the ironic statement that the 26-year-old actor years plays the leader of the band, Saúl Hernández, in a biographical film.
Without a doubt, some of the most ingenious memes were those that mixed elements that refer to both the actor and the Mexican group.
“Lend me your comb and comb my soul, Mr. Stark”, reads one of the images that became popular on social networks and plays with verses from the song Wind, which is part of the band’s debut album, Caifanes, published in 1988, and with how the character of Spider-Man refers to that of Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
As expected in a conversation like this in which, for some, it is easier to expose the truth to end the guesswork and the discussion, although that also means cutting the fun outright, there were network users who gave in to the task of tracing the origin of the photograph of Tom Holland with the alleged Caifanes shirt and they found that, as expected and to the sadness of the band’s fans, it was all a montage.
Is the photo of Tom Holland with the Caifanes shirt real?
The Caifanes logo seen on the shirt worn by Tom Holland in the image that went viral was ingeniously “photoshopped” by a user who, perhaps without imagining it, wove a “digital web” in which thousands of Mexican Internet users became entangled. . Actually in the original photo the logo of the band does not appear on the shirt, as expected.
The interesting thing about this whole anecdote is that it has an even deeper reading because making this meme with the image of Tom Holland and the Caifanes logo was not a matter left to chance.
In recent months, if not years, the name Caifanes, a band originally made up of Saúl Hernández, Sabo Romo, Alfonso André, Diego Herrera, and Alejandro Marcovich, has been used on social networks to make fun of the generation of Mexican music lovers. who are already over 40 years old and who, due to the generation gap that separates them from millennials and centennials, are often seen as “grumpy old men”.
The members of this age group are represented in social networks as “ Chamorros ” that disqualify the younger generations with an affinity for musical genres such as urban or electronic with the phrase “ What are you going to know about rock, kid asshole? ”, which has become a very popular meme.
On the other hand, Tom Holland is, at 26 years old, the personification of the youth that was born and grew up immersed in the digital age and is oblivious to the rudiments such as cassettes, VCRs, rotary phones, fax, radio, and the bands, like Caifanes, which for the youngest are “vestiges” of an era they only know from movies, conversations or because they stumbled across a video on YouTube, but for those who lived through it they are a fundamental part of their personal history.
So if you come across the song Kill me because I’m dying and it doesn’t make sense to you, you better not look for its meaning because “you wouldn’t understand it”.
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