A Guide to Children’s Culture for Disconnected Adults: Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX”
This week, we take a look at Kendrick Lamar’s surprise new album, delve into the world of banned words in class, find out what “juggling” means, and look at how easy it is to scam people using cryptocurrency. What a world!
Why is everyone talking about Kendrick Lamar’s GNX ?
On Friday at noon, without warning, rapper Kendrick Lamar released a 12-track album on streaming services. To paraphrase Kendrick’s “Not like us,” sometimes you gotta get out there and show the neighbors, and that’s what Lamar does with GNX . It’s a heady musical journey, with references to everything from mariachi to retro soul, smooth jazz and ’90s LA G-funk, and lyrics packed with the kind of dense, hype flow that makes Lamar the greatest rapper alive. It’s an early Christmas gift that we probably don’t deserve.
GNX is the only thing that matters in youth culture (really just culture) this week. This is a rare event for critical times. If you want to understand where young people’s heads are right now, go to Spotify and listen to this album . Here’s just some of the ripples coming from the boulder Kendrick dropped into the cultural lake:
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According to Spotify, ” Squabble Up ” was streamed 20 million times in the first three days of release.
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The world was introduced to AzChike, Lefty Gunplay, Peysoh and YoungThreat, among others. Along with Los Angeles rappers who “haven’t heard of them,” Lamar also collaborated on three tracks with 49-year-old mariachi singer Deira Barrera. He saw her perform at Game 1 of the World Series a few weeks ago and was in the studio recording vocals a few days later .
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The New York Times , Rolling Stone , Pitchfork and everyone else reacted with varying degrees of “this is really, really good.”
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Kendrick’s friend-turned-foe Drake responded with silence . Given their history, probably a good move.
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Everyone on the internet jumped on Lamar, shouting ” Mustaaard !” (a reference to the track’s producer DJ Mustard) on the track ” TV Off ” with memes , adding references to The Simpsons , Shrek , Peanuts and more. Of course, corporate vultures have jumped on the trend, but so has Lizzo . DJ Mustard responded to X with “Dot!!!!” (Lamar is also known as K-Dot) and that moves me. But my favorite meme of the moment demonstrates what happens when you don’t put the right seasoning on Kendrick’s hot dog:
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Viral Video of the Week: “Squabble Up”
If you’re saying, “I really don’t care about Kendrick Lamar,” sorry, because Kendrick also released a new video for “Squabble Up” this morning, and it’s as viral as the H1N1 virus, with the video playing for over a year and a half. a million times in just a couple of hours .
Like Kendrick’s music, the video, directed by Calmatic , is joyful, deep, personal yet universal, mysterious, powerful and – look, it’s a must see. It’s filled with imagery up for interpretation, references to scraper bikes, Ice-T’s 1988 Power album, the “scrambling board” from Soul Train , Isaac Hayes’ 1971 album Black Moms , and 8,000 other things I’m not cool enough for. recognize. Watch months, maybe even years of interpretations, theories and bad looks on this video. Or just nod your head at him for a few minutes.
What does “jong” mean?
Moving from art to slang , let’s look at the word “juggling”. It means stealing. This term is gaining popularity on TikTok along with the “-uzz” slang that has been causing brain rot lately. Like most modern slang, it comes from AAVE.
This Week in Brain Rot: Banned Word Lists and Programs .pdf-to-brainrot
Being an educator has never been an easy job, but it must be especially difficult in the current cultural moment, when we have abandoned even the pretext of caring about intellectual matters, talk of abolishing the Department of Education , and children talking with brains. But look on the bright side, teachers: you can make some funny memes out of this. Know that your meme has collected 18 viral photos of the list of banned words in the classroom. All the usual suspects are present here: Skibidi, Rizz, Gyatt, Sigma, etc., and it provides insight into the unique challenges of education in 2024. If I were a teacher, I would give up!
But some people are hopeful (perhaps), as evidenced by various online learning sites offering “.PDF to Brainrot” utilities that aim to make learning more understandable by translating any text you want into a “brainrot video.” I highly doubt the effectiveness of this strategy, but what do I know? By the way, I delved deeper into this trend .
This week’s scam: Pump and dump scam backfires
Let’s finish by looking at cryptocurrency scams, shall we? Earlier this week, a member of Gen Z, or maybe Gen A, decided to have a little fun with the collective concept of “value” by creating his own cryptocurrency. Anyone with a few hundred dollars can do this, and it takes about eight seconds . This shouldn’t be a problem because a digital currency has no value if other people don’t believe in it, so make as many meme coins as you want, what could it hurt? However, this young entrepreneur live-streamed the creation of his meme coin on pump.fun, and something about him made enough people buy his coin to appreciate its value. A few hours later, Gen Z Kid sold his 51 million shares for $30,000. Total profit: $29,600 for a couple of hours of “work.”
However, the only profit went to the child. The remaining “investors” who invested in the purchase of the coin were left with a digital bag of worthless coins. Pumping and dumping have been around for as long as markets have existed, and it’s not even close to the biggest “carpet” in cryptocurrency , but it is notable for the age of the puller – young enough that his financial misdeeds supposedly ended after someone said to his mother that he was ready for the end of the story.
It may have been the two middle fingers the kid gave on his stream as he pulled the rug out from under investors, but the story got enough traction in the world of “meme coin investors” (a real thing!) that people wanted revenge. Internet weirdos not only told his mom about it, but also bought enough of the depreciated coin to send it to the proverbial moon. It is reported that the original scammers’ shares would have been worth $4,000,000 if he had kept them. This will show him!
Except that if he had kept the coins, there would be no “little rascals; let’s catch him! narrative to exaggerate their value so he doesn’t make extra money. In fact, this “let’s get revenge” story was a much more successful “pump and dump” than the boy’s original plan, leading to speculation (at least on my part) that a larger “pump and dump” was the goal all along. , and The Guy Who Stole the Money was fake from the start.
I can’t think about the modern world anymore. I’m looking for an ice floe on which I can now go down into the ocean.