Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” video brought together most of the elements of my childhood. The chunky guitars echoed seventies rock from bands like the Raspberries. Weezer embraced their inner geek by casting themselves within a homage to the sitcom, “Happy Days.” For a kid who grew up on Richie, Potsie and The Fonz, it was the ultimate trip, a delicious embrace of disposable pop culture. It put director Spike Jonze on the map, winning MTV’s 1995 Breakthrough Video award. “Buddy Holly” made music videos a respectable, cut-and-paste art form.

With their new video for “Pork and Beans,” Weezer has buried the MTV era and embraced the network that matters most, YouTube. The first single on their red album is classic power pop: short, sweet, and anthemic. But the “Pork and Beans” video takes the song to another level by embracing the absurdity of instant Internet celebrities. It is a massive, viral video test. The humor will be completely lost upon those who ignore those forward emails with links to strange outtakes. But for people who can’t get enough stupid human tricks, Weezer creates a wondrous chance to play name that meme.

For those who can’t name the meme (because they don’t know what a meme is!), Richard Dawkins coined the word thirty years ago in his book, THE SELFISH GENE. A meme is a thought, catch-phrase, or in the Internet era, a link, that is passed from one person to another in rapid fashion. Whenever we choose to forward a joke, a video, an article, we are engaging in a form of natural selection. Some may argue with Dawkins’ theories, but he offered a viable explanation for why the funniest, craziest and most memorable videos rise to the top on YouTube. And Weezer put all of YouTube’s most useless bits into one slamming stew of “Pork and Beans.”