Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" is a rap track released in the summer of 2014 that leans on the bassline and hook from Sir Mix-a-Lot's 1992 song "Baby Got Back"3. The meme layer around it has two distinct pieces: the pink single cover, which shows Minaj crouched in a thong and quickly became a Photoshop template, and the jungle-set music video, which spun off reaction GIFs and parody uploads within hours of release31.

The running joke across both formats is exaggeration. Bloggers cropped the cover into famous paintings and album sleeves5, while GIF roundups isolated tiny moments from the video, including the closing lap dance Minaj gives Drake, and treated each as its own punchline3. The tone is unabashedly NSFW, which is part of why writers built entire listicles warning readers about it before showing the clips3.

The "Anaconda" meme typically works one of two ways. For the cover art, editors cut Minaj's crouched pose out of the pink single sleeve and drop it into an unrelated image, often a Renaissance painting or a classic album cover, letting the visual mismatch do the joke5. For the video, the common convention is to grab a two- or three-second GIF of one moment (the lap dance, a squat, a facial reaction) and post it as a standalone reaction to something completely unrelated3.