The Low Taper Fade Meme: Two Years of Still Massive

A man sang one sentence about another man’s hypothetical haircut, and the internet has never fully recovered. The sentence was “imagine if Ninja got a low taper fade”. It has no punchline, no context and no reason to exist, and it may be the most durable meme of its generation.

Where the line came from

On 5 January 2024, the singer ericdoa was freestyling live on Twitch. The stream had turned genuinely emotional; by most retellings he had been improvising about something heavy and reached for the funniest thought he could find to break the mood. What came out, sung in complete earnest over the beat, was a hypothetical about the streamer Ninja (Tyler Blevins) getting a specific men’s haircut.

The delivery is the whole meme. The melody is legitimately good, the voice cracks with feeling, and the content is a barber recommendation for a Fortnite streamer. A clip posted to the ericdoaclips TikTok account on 11 January pulled over a million views inside a day, and the sound escaped into the wild.

What followed was the classic TikTok machinery running at full speed. Slideshows imagined the haircut with increasingly unhinged Photoshop. Reaction videos filmed people hearing the line for the first time. Other streamers covered it, badly, on purpose. Within a fortnight, “imagine if Ninja got a low taper fade” was less a clip than a shared reflex; you could say the first three words in a school corridor and the room would finish the sentence.

For anyone arriving from the hair side of the internet: yes, the low taper fade is also a real and very popular haircut, and that’s everything this article has to say about barbering.

Ninja actually got the haircut

This is the turn that separates the meme from a thousand forgotten TikTok sounds. Ninja heard the song, leaned all the way in, and got an actual low taper fade, documented for his millions of followers. The hypothetical stopped being hypothetical. Imagine if Ninja got a low taper fade; he did.

Most memes die when the subject acknowledges them. This one levelled up, because the subject refused to stop acknowledging it.

Is the low taper fade meme still massive?

If you’re searching that exact phrase, you already know it’s a quote. At the end of January 2024, weeks after the joke peaked, a clip spread of Ninja singing the line on stream and then declaring: “You know what’s crazy? Is that that low taper fade meme is, like… dude, it is still massive.”

It was not still massive. It became massive again because he said that. The meme’s second act is entirely about Ninja dragging a dead joke back on stage, and the internet punishing him by making the dragging itself the joke. The “still massive” clip became a copypasta, spawned AI voice covers, and by late 2024 had mutated into its own meta-meme about what else, precisely, is massive. Every attempt anyone has made to declare the whole thing finished has functioned as a renewal notice.

So, honestly: yes. Two years on, the phrase outperforms most memes’ opening weeks. It survives the way “it’s over 9000” survived, as a stock phrase people deploy without thinking about Ninja’s hairline at all.

What happened to the song

The freestyle had a strange afterlife for a joke. Because the melody was real, producers kept building on it: sped-up edits, drill remixes, orchestral versions, covers in other languages. People search the lyric itself, word for word, at a scale most released singles never reach. ericdoa has been a good sport about the fact that a decade of actual songwriting may end up outlived by one improvised sentence about a haircut.

Play the sound

The Low Taper Fade sound button is on Bleepboard, free to play and download as an MP3. It remains the correct response to any group-chat claim that something is over, finished or dead.

You’ll find it on the brainrot soundboard alongside the rest of the era’s greatest hits, and with the other viral audio on the TikTok soundboard. For a meme with the opposite life cycle, one built on a phrase that means nothing rather than one that means too much, see what 67 means.