The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture: Why Is Lil Yachty in Poland?
Reading Time: 3 minutesLil Yachty’s ‘Poland’ is about drugs. Or maybe it’s about walking around in Eastern Europe.
Halloween is coming, and things are getting very weird. Rapper Lil Yachty is taking a walk to Poland, and TikTokers are putting pumpkins on their heads, buying all the skeletons on earth, and making their pets into demons. Oh, and NFT marketers are entering the TikTok-sphere to lie to kids about the metaverse.
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Viral video of the week: Lil Yachty Poland (Music Video)
If you’re around young people this week, you will hear them singing about walking to Poland. The culprit is rapper Lil Yachty’s ‘Poland,’ a dreamy ear-worm with a chorus that will drill right into your brain and live there until you too are also walking around chanting, ‘I took a woooock to Poland.’ The ‘official’ video, in which Yachty does, in fact, walk around in Poland, was released a half hour before I wrote this, but if doesn’t have a million hits in the next day, I’ll be shocked.
As for what the song means, there’s a double meaning in the word ‘walk/wock.’ Wock is supposedly short for Wockhardt, a pharmaceutical company that makes codeine cough syrup. It makes a lot more sense when combined with the track’s leaned-out, warbly lo-fi vibe. But maybe I’m wrong and it’s just a great song about walking around in Eastern Europe. Check it out and decide for yourself.
TikTok gears up for Halloween
TikTok is celebrating the best holiday, Halloween, in its own special way. Below are three TikTok trends related to the spooky season.
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- Invasion of the 12-foot skeletons: The hottest Halloween decoration by far this year are the 12-foot-tall, $300 skeletons sold by Home Depot. With sales boosted by huge popularity on TikTok (and being fucking awesome) the skeletons cannot be acquired for love or money. Better luck next year.
- The return of TikTok pumpkinheads: For the second year in a row, TikTok is celebrating Halloween by purchasing huge pumpkins, hollowing them out, and running around and posing for hilarious photos. It’s call the Pumpkinhead Photoshoot Challenge, and it rules.
- Belial, Behemoth, and Beelzebub invade TikTok: Famous demons Belial, Behemoth, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Satanas, and Lucifer have never been so adorable. In a new challenge or trend or whatever, TikTokers are freeze-framing their pets (dogs, ferrets, ducks and even a raven) to look like the named demons over a moody Neo-goth soundtrack. As always with these things, it’s more fun to watch than explain.
Creator of the #PorcelainChallenge banned from TikTok
TikTok can’t take a joke. Sebastian Durfee, formerly known as @childprogeny, posted a video hyping The Porcelain Challenge, where kids are seen to smashing their parents’ antique china, grinding it into a powder, and snorting it. This is not a shocking new trend, though. It’s a joke, made better by other TikTokers who responded by seeding the video on Facebook, and making fake reports that TikTok was removing the videos because kids were being hurt.
In a case of life imitating jokes, TikTok really did ban Durfee from the site, remove videos with the hashtags, and even remove videos reporting that TikTok was removing videos. The message: Don’t try to be funny; TikTok is serious business.
Virtual strippers, the Metaverse, and NFTs collide in an unholy high-tech nightmare
I don’t usually cover anything in ‘The Metaverse,’ because I don’t really understand what it is, and literally no one uses it, but this story is a Russian nesting doll of high-tech horribleness that’s at least five-levels deep. It’s like something out of a dystopian futurist’s worst acid trip, just too terrible to ignore. Let me try to explain:
TikTok videos (level one) are appearing that tell young men that they can make a ton of money if they become virtual (female) strippers in The Metaverse (level two). According to the ads, in order to sign up for the highly-paid virtual sex work, you must visit a Discord (level 3) server. Those who worm this far into the rotten apple eventually learn it’s a bait-and-switch when they are directed to another Discord channel that hypes some fly-by-night NFT project (level 4). This all takes place within the framework of Western Capitalism (level 5).
I can’t bear to think about the modern world any longer. Good bye. ‘I’m taking a woooooooock— to Poland.’