Arizona Iced Tea

2013aesthetic imageclassic

Arizona Iced Tea is the pastel-canned drink that became a visual mascot of vaporwave and sad boy internet aesthetics starting in 2013, when Swedish rapper Yung Lean cradled bottles on camera in his music video for Hurt. The 99-cent tallboy with cherry blossom art turned into a shorthand for a whole online look.

fashion aesthetic memesconsumer culture memeship hop memestumblr memesmid 2010s memes

Overview

Arizona Iced Tea is the pastel-canned beverage that turned into one of the visual mascots of vaporwave and sad boy internet aesthetics in the mid-2010s 1. The 99-cent 32-ounce tallboys, with their cherry blossom and desert-sunset artwork, kept showing up in Yung Lean music videos, ironic fan photos, and Tumblr edits 3.

The company itself is a Woodbury, New York beverage brand started in 1992 by John Ferolito and Don Vultaggio, two former Brooklyn beer distributors 3. Their pledge to never charge more than 99 cents for the big can kept the drink cheap enough for teenagers, which helped push it deep into online youth culture 3.

How It Spread

In 2014, a thread on hip-hop forum KanyeToThe.com 3 became one of the most-cited sad boy jokes online: three teenage white boys pretending to cry while holding Arizona cans. That image spread through Tumblr and Twitter, where the pastel can was paired with palm trees, kanji, and Windows 95 UI screenshots 1.

On September 30, 2016, Daily Dot 1 published a piece asking how Arizona Iced Tea became essential to meme culture. AV Club followed the next day with a Great Job, Internet! post asking what 'pure, raw aesthetic tastes like' 2. Both articles pointed to the brand's Twitter account @DrinkArizona, which started interacting with meme posts and made it clear the company knew about its cult status in vaporwave circles 4.

Urban Dictionary entries from the same window still treat the drink with tongue-in-cheek reverence, calling it 'the best drink' in slang-heavy definitions and cementing the tallboy's status as a shared teenage in-joke 5.

How to Use This Meme

The Arizona Iced Tea meme format typically involves placing the pastel 32-ounce can, most often the cherry blossom Green Tea, inside an edit stacked with vaporwave elements: pink and teal gradients, Japanese kanji, palm trees, or old Windows UI 1. Poses often mirror the Yung Lean 'Hurt' look, with the drinker holding the bottle up while staring blankly at the camera 3.

Frequently Asked Questions

Arizona Iced Tea

2013aesthetic imageclassic

Arizona Iced Tea is the pastel-canned drink that became a visual mascot of vaporwave and sad boy internet aesthetics starting in 2013, when Swedish rapper Yung Lean cradled bottles on camera in his music video for Hurt. The 99-cent tallboy with cherry blossom art turned into a shorthand for a whole online look.

fashion aesthetic memes consumer culture memes hip hop memes tumblr memes mid 2010s memes

Overview

Arizona Iced Tea is the pastel-canned beverage that turned into one of the visual mascots of vaporwave and sad boy internet aesthetics in the mid-2010s 1. The 99-cent 32-ounce tallboys, with their cherry blossom and desert-sunset artwork, kept showing up in Yung Lean music videos, ironic fan photos, and Tumblr edits 3.

The company itself is a Woodbury, New York beverage brand started in 1992 by John Ferolito and Don Vultaggio, two former Brooklyn beer distributors 3. Their pledge to never charge more than 99 cents for the big can kept the drink cheap enough for teenagers, which helped push it deep into online youth culture 3.

How It Spread

In 2014, a thread on hip-hop forum KanyeToThe.com 3 became one of the most-cited sad boy jokes online: three teenage white boys pretending to cry while holding Arizona cans. That image spread through Tumblr and Twitter, where the pastel can was paired with palm trees, kanji, and Windows 95 UI screenshots 1.

On September 30, 2016, Daily Dot 1 published a piece asking how Arizona Iced Tea became essential to meme culture. AV Club followed the next day with a Great Job, Internet! post asking what 'pure, raw aesthetic tastes like' 2. Both articles pointed to the brand's Twitter account @DrinkArizona, which started interacting with meme posts and made it clear the company knew about its cult status in vaporwave circles 4.

Urban Dictionary entries from the same window still treat the drink with tongue-in-cheek reverence, calling it 'the best drink' in slang-heavy definitions and cementing the tallboy's status as a shared teenage in-joke 5.

How to Use This Meme

The Arizona Iced Tea meme format typically involves placing the pastel 32-ounce can, most often the cherry blossom Green Tea, inside an edit stacked with vaporwave elements: pink and teal gradients, Japanese kanji, palm trees, or old Windows UI 1. Poses often mirror the Yung Lean 'Hurt' look, with the drinker holding the bottle up while staring blankly at the camera 3.

Frequently Asked Questions