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Justin Timberlake knows his legacy. Despite all the records and the success, there’s one thing he achieved that he never sought out: a meme that has lasted years. As we enter the month of May, Timberlake shared a video making fun of the now iconic meme and the mispronunciation that started it all.
The video shows a woman talking to the camera. “What’s the word you pronounced incorrectly one time and it still haunts you to this day?” she said. The clip cuts to Timberlake, who’s wearing a tanktop and looks at the camera directly. “Uh... Me,” he says with a sarcastic smile. “It’s gonna be...,” he captioned the post.
The meme sparked from the NSYNC song “It’s Gonna Be Me.” Timberlake sings a verse saying the name of the song, with the word Me sounding like May. And thus a meme was born.
“ITS GONNA BE MAYYYY,” wrote a follower in the comment’s section. “Happy it’s gonna be MAY day!” wrote a second person.
How did it all start?
Joey Fatone, one of NSYNC’s band members, gave some background on the song and how the pronunciation of the word “Me” started. “It was just, ‘It’s gonna be me.’ When you sing it, it sounds a lot harsher if you’re trying to go, ‘It’s gonna be meeeee.’ It doesn’t sound very good to the ear,” he said in an interview with PEOPLE. “So when we pronounced it, [producer] Max Martin came up with the idea of saying, ‘It’s gonna be May.’ But we never knew that it was going to take off and become its own thing. And every year you get crazy stuff. But it’s hilarious. And we might as well embrace it.”
Nowdays, the former boyband continues to joke around with the meme on their group chat.
