A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

Screaming Cowboy in the Sky

What this meme means

Meme from a frame of the 2017 video for "Big Enough" by Kirin J. Callinan featuring Jimmy Barnes, showing a translucent cowboy screaming over a desert. Used to express despair and disappointment.

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Description

Cowboy screaming at the sky is a meme based on a frame from a music video. The image shows a man in a cowboy hat and a dark jacket screaming with his head thrown back. His figure is translucent and seems to hover above a desert landscape with hills. The frame matches the catalog's description: a screaming man in cowboy attire in the sky above cliffs.

The meaning of the meme is to express a strong emotion that finds no outlet: despair, exhaustion, or disappointment. The image is typically used when a situation calls for a loud reaction, but the speaker is forced to hold themselves back. The format suits short captions and is recognized by the frame's silhouette and color scheme.

The "Big Enough" video

The song "Big Enough" was released in 2017 and is a single by Australian musician Kirin J. Callinan. The track features Alex Cameron and Molly Lewis, and Jimmy Barnes appears in the video as a giant translucent cowboy. The song was included on Callinan's album Bravado, released in June 2017. The video came out in the summer of 2017, directed by Danny Cohen.

The video's plot is built in a western style: two rival cowboys set aside their differences. Molly Lewis whistles up at the sky, and Barnes's figure appears from it, screaming over a dance breakdown. It was precisely this scene that later broke free of the video's context and took on a life of its own.

Jimmy Barnes

Jimmy Barnes is a Scottish-Australian rock musician, one of the best-selling figures in Australian music. He is known as the frontman of the band Cold Chisel and as a pub-rock performer. In the mid-1990s his career went through a decline, after which he returned to the charts as one of the country's longest-running artists. In November 2017 his memoir, Working Class Man, was published.

According to Barnes, he agreed to record the scream before he had even heard the track, and screamed "like a banshee" for about five minutes. The cowboy costume, he said, came from his own wardrobe. Viewers seeing him in this role for the first time were often unfamiliar with his music career.

Spread

By the end of 2017, Barnes's scream had become a standalone internet meme. Shots of the cowboy were overlaid onto scenes from popular films and series, and the scream itself was posted as looped videos. One version, published on YouTube, was a ten-hour loop of the scream and gathered around 1.8 million views.

The video itself had gathered around 44 million views as of December 2019. Remixes placed the image of Barnes into Jurassic Park, Rick and Morty, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones. Screenshots of the cowboy were posted alongside absurd news stories, and the video was often recommended with phrases like "you have to watch this."

Why the meme became popular

The popularity is tied above all to Barnes's performance. The scream was perceived as an emotional release and combined humor with a sense of liberation. Many viewers initially took the song seriously, and the element of surprise intensified the reaction. At the same time, the video was short and recognizable enough that clips of it were easily carried over into new captions.

There is also another side to it. The audience that came to it through the meme was often unfamiliar with Barnes's body of work, and his own fans, by his account, greeted what was happening with bewilderment. This is a typical case of a fragment of a work taking on a life independent of the work itself.