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Every year in the month of April, a meme featuring Justin Timberlake goes viral online. This has now become a pre-May ritual, which has taken Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and several other social media platforms by storm. Like every year, the "It’s gonna be May" meme is back again, and people are wondering what it means.
Most of the memes see a young Timberlake with some lyrics from the NSYNC song, It's Gonna Be Me, which was released in 2000. The band consisted of Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Lance Bass, Joey Fatone, and Chris Kirkpatrick.
With the meme emerging in 2000, many users started sharing Timberlake's picture saying "It’s Gonna Be May," simply because in the song, he pronounced "me" as "may."
As per Know Your Meme, the viral meme became popular in March 2012, when a Tumblr blog shared an image of a calendar opened to April, with an attached picture of Justin and a caption that read "It's Gonna Be May."
Not just GIFs, people also share short 5-second clips of Justin Timberlake, where he is heard singing:
“Guess what? It’s gonna be me.”
Justin Timberlake's May joke goes viral as netizens welcome the new month
As the meme has become a staple of internet culture, resurfacing every April, people share memes and GIFs of Timberlake with the famous caption. Here are some of the funniest and most creative "It's Gonna Be May" memes that have emerged on social media platforms recently.
Justin Timberlake shared the joke on Twitter in 2020
The joke has become so popular over the years that it reached the artist as well a few years ago. The singer himself shared the meme during the pandemic in 2020. He used a picture of himself wearing a face mask and the text of the image read, "It's Gonna Be May."
He captioned the post:
“Spring Summer 2020. Thanks for this, Internet.”
Back in 2016, he was asked in an interview if he knew about the joke and what made him pronounce "me" in a way in which it sounded like "may." To this, he responded by claiming that the song's co-writer directed him to sing the line in that particular way.
He told Capital FM:
“I think he just wanted me to sound like I was from Tennessee.”
Apart from Justin, various other celebrities and former President Obama also shared a picture back in 2014 with the same caption.
The song has become extremely popular and has garnered more than 177 million views on YouTube in the last 13 years.
