Giorno's Theme — Giorno Giovanna from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure composited behind the lid of a grand piano

Giorno's Theme

2018viral videoclassic

Published October 24, 2026

Giorno's Theme, also known as Giorno's Piano, is the piano passage from Il vento d'oro, the main soundtrack cue of the 2018 anime JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind. Because the melody plays whenever protagonist Giorno Giovanna is about to defeat an opponent, Reddit's /r/ShitpostCrusaders turned it into a running joke in early 2019, and by late that year YouTubers were pasting the piano over Avengers scenes, public piano covers and reaction edits.

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Overview

Giorno's Theme, also called Giorno's Piano, is the orchestral and piano cue titled Il vento d'oro (Italian for Golden Wind) that plays over climactic scenes in the fifth part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure1. In the show, the delicate piano intro starts just before Giorno Giovanna lands a decisive blow, so viewers began treating the opening bars as a sound effect for inevitable defeat2.

Memes using the track fall into two shapes. One is image-based: a screenshot or drawing captioned so the reader supplies the melody in their head, like Redditor Solariu's February 2019 post playing on the piano trope2. The other is video-based, where editors paste the piano under any scene of someone being outclassed, from Marvel fights to real-life pratfalls3. First-listen reaction edits and public-piano stunts round out the format, pairing the music with surprised bystanders or crossover anime villains.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube (source) / Reddit (viral spread)
Date
2018

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind began airing on October 5th, 2018, with music composed by Yugo Kanno. The soundtrack arrived on December 19th, 2018, and the same day YouTube channel Golden Weed uploaded Il vento d'oro, where it drew more than 98 million views over the next two years1. A separate reupload trimmed to just the piano passage picked up over 17 million views in the same window4.

The meme format emerged on February 4th, 2019, when Redditor Solariu posted a joke to /r/ShitpostCrusaders titled "Piano dramatically intensifies," calling out how the piano cue signals Giorno is about to win2. The post gained over 1,500 upvotes in five months3. On June 24th, Redditor hiimawerewolf posted a chart comparing how each JoJo protagonist fights, with the punchline that Giorno just needs the piano, bringing in over 14,100 upvotes in two days5.

How It Spread

After Solariu's February post, piano memes multiplied inside /r/ShitpostCrusaders through the spring, including fan art of Giorno carrying a piano everywhere he goes6. One of the earliest viral YouTube edits came on February 27th, 2019, when channel Meme and Stuff cut the theme over Avengers footage in an "X goes with everything" parody, pulling in 1.6 million views7. An accordion cover by Vackarash on June 22nd added over a million more views to the song's reach3.

By summer, the piano cue was a TikTok and Instagram staple. Content creator largetrap posted a Giorno's Theme edit to Instagram on July 19th that passed 550,000 views8, and on July 25th YouTuber John Anime scored Yu-Gi-Oh! character Kaiba's defeat with the piano, drawing 1.3 million views9. House of the Dank uploaded two breakout videos in August, including an Earthquake Makeup edit on August 15th that climbed above 8.7 million views10.

The format kept producing hits into the fall. On August 31st, Moog posted "When you listen to Giorno's theme for the first time," using a subtitled Russian interview clip, which reached over 4.6 million views3. Pianist Joe Jenkins uploaded a public-piano cover on October 24th that eventually passed 32.8 million views, the single biggest reach for any Giorno's Theme video documented by Know Your Meme11.

Timeline

2018-10-05

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind begins airing in Japan.

2018-12-19

The Golden Wind soundtrack is released, and Golden Weed uploads Il vento d'oro to YouTube.

2019-02-04

Redditor Solariu posts the first widely upvoted piano meme to /r/ShitpostCrusaders.

2019-02-27

Meme and Stuff posts an Avengers edit scored with Giorno's Theme that reaches 1.6 million views.

2019-06-24

Redditor hiimawerewolf's JoJo protagonist comparison chart hits over 14,100 upvotes in two days.

2019-08-15

House of the Dank's Earthquake Makeup edit with Giorno's Theme passes 8.7 million views.

2019-10-24

Pianist Joe Jenkins uploads a public piano cover that goes on to reach 32.8 million views.

How to Use This Meme

A typical video edit drops the piano intro at the moment someone is about to be humiliated or defeated, letting the melody imply the outcome before it happens. Image macros often lean on the subreddit convention of a caption like "image you can hear," trusting viewers to supply the music from memory6. First-listen reaction videos invert the joke by showing someone experiencing the full track for the first time.

Frequently Asked Questions