Your Music's Bad and You Should Feel Bad

About

“Your Music’s Bad and You Should Feel Bad” is a memorable quote from a 2003 episode of Futurama. Online, it has become a snowclone (“Your X is Bad and You Should Feel Bad”), most often used in an image macro series featuring the character Zoidberg to shame others for actions or opinions that someone perceives as negative.

Origin

The phrase “Your Music’s Bad and You Should Feel Bad” was first uttered in the Futurama episode titled “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings,”^[5] which first aired on August 10th, 2003. After Fry trades hands with the Robot Devil, he performs an opera in effort to woo Leela. In the middle of the performance, the Robot Devil returns and demands his hands back from Fry, or else the Devil would marry Leela himself. Fry agrees, and continues the performance, who is now significantly less skilled at playing the holophoner. As Fry is playing poorly, Zoidberg criticizes his music from the crowd.

Hedonism Bot: Less reality, more fantasy. Resume the opera.
Fry: But I can’t play anymore!
Dr. Zoidberg: Yes you can! The music was in your heart, not your hands.
[Fry plays off key, everyone boos.]
Dr. Zoidberg: Your music’s bad and you should feel bad!

Spread

Snowclone derivatives of the phrase have been used online since as early as February 2009. On February 5th, 2009, a user of the MetaFilter MetaTalk^[3] forums used “Your tags are bad and you should feel bad” as the title of a post criticizing other users who do not properly tag their submissions to MetaFilter. By July 2009, the snowclone phrase began to appear with a still from the Futurama episode featuring Zoidberg wearing a tuxedo and bow tie in a thread on the IGN forums.^[1]

In December 2009, “Your Voting Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad” was used as the headline for a Deadspin^[2] story on voting for that year’s All-Star basketball team. In 2010, two Facebook fan pages^[4]^[6] were created for the phrase, gaining less than 300 likes between them as of July 2013. A third Facebook fan page^[7] was created in October 2011, accruing 34 likes as of July 2013. Two months later, in November, a thread titled “Your English is Bad and You Should Feel Bad”^[8] was created, mocking other posters who mixed up the words “your” and “you’re.” In March 2012, We Know Memes created an image macro generator^[9] using the Zoidberg still, which has since accrued 451 submissions. By July 2012, a Meme Generator^[10] page was also created, accruing nearly 600 submissions, as well as three separate Quickmeme generators^[11]^[12]^[13] which have more than 6,400 submissions among them.