Lance Bass joins the “It's going to be May Day.” festivities.
The NSYNC alum posted a Tik Tok mocking former bandmate Justin Timberlake on Tuesday, whose mispronunciation of the word “I” in the 2000 hit “It's Gonna Be Me” gave rise to a now 12-year-old meme.
In the video, pink-haired Bass passes a love note to her husband Michael Turchin, who is eating ramen.
“Michael, roses are red, April is gray, but when you wake up tomorrow,” Turchin reads as the infamous song fades out. The camera zooms in on Bass, who now sports hair made of what looks like ramen, parodying young Timberlake's blonde hair. He curls and lip-syncs the famous “May” line.
The video ends with Turchin looking confused at his now-empty bowl and Bass smugly swaying to the pop tune.
“POV: Your friend mispronounces a word once and now it's a national holiday. Happy #itsgonnabemay day!,” Bass captioned the video of him.
A couple of hours later, Timberlake called himself on vacation and posted on instagram a video he originally shared on Tik Tok in September. On it sew a video message from TikTok user @umgabi, who asked viewers, “What's a word you pronounced incorrectly once that still haunts you to this day?”
“Um, me,” Timberlake responds with a concessive nod.
(For what it's worth, @umgabi said in her original TikTok that her mistake was with the word “unfair,” which she thought was Spanish and translated into four syllables instead of two. But “Va a ser STAH·leh ·mah·teh” is not as catchy as “It's Gonna Be May”).
This is not the first time Timberlake has acknowledged the meme. In 2021, he paid tribute to its creator, Kianna Davis. In 2012, Davis pasted a photo of the boy band's protagonist at the bottom of the April page on his wall calendar, accompanied by the words “It's Gonna Be.”
“I just did it to make 10 of my NSYNC friends laugh,” Davis said. athleticismc last week. “I wasn't trying to go viral or anything like that.”
However, “It's Gonna Be May” has been written in NSYNC lore and each year brings new meme iterations.
As for Davis, the Athletic reported that she appeared on Bass's podcast and was personally invited to a Timberlake concert in Memphis, although she has yet to meet the now-solo artist.
Maybe that will change soon, as he plans to attend the Raleigh stop on the Forget Tomorrow World Tour, which JT kicked off Monday in Vancouver. And May himself published a summary of the inaugural show on Tuesday in instagram.
