A Guide to Children’s Culture for Disconnected Adults: Lady Gaga and the Death of the Neo-Medieval Ages
I try to write about new trends in this column, but this week I’m flipping the script, as they say, and looking at four popular things at the end : neo-medievalism, Kendrick Lamar, memes and movies – all of which are in the process of being tossed on the trash heap by young people.
Lady Gaga and the Death of the Neo-Medieval Ages
If you watched Lady Gaga perform on Saturday Night Live on March 8, you may not have realized that you were witnessing the end of a youth trend, the moment when neo-medievalism went from cool to commoditized.
In parallel with the presenter, Gaga presented her new single “Abracadabra” to the SNL audience and did a lot of things . The song’s clean pop hooks mixed with hard-hitting dance beats would not have been out of place on Gaga’s 2008 release The Fame , so it’s Lady Gaga warming up for her own nachos . But there are much older nachos, too: From the Gregorian chants of background singers to Gaga’s dancers rocking corpse paint and plague doctor outfits, Gaga dabbles in neo-medievalism, an aesthetic born in cutting-edge art and fashion circles that has slowly seeped into the mainstream over the past few years.
Perhaps in response to the world moving from globalism to warring regional powers, just like in the Middle Ages, fashion designers such as Hedi Slimane began dressing models in leather ren-faire outfits to make them look like ” capricious princes.” Meanwhile, non-mainstream musicians such as Dandelion Wine began adding drum machines and synthesizers to medieval-style tunes. The neo-medieval style is based on people’s ideas about history rather than the actual subject matter (I doubt a 13th century Hungarian peasant would have known what to do with Abracadabra), so it owes a debt to role-playing video games, fantasy films, and Dungeons and Dragons.
Over the past few years, neo-medievalism has become a whole phenomenon. But the swing revival of the 1990s was also something special, and the whole thing dies the same way that Big Bad Voodoo Daddy did: too many people started paying attention, and what was once cool and underground becomes ridiculous and embarrassing.
You could see the cracks forming when Chappell Rohan showed up at the Grammys looking like this:
But Rohan is at least over 20. Lady Gaga is almost 40 years old. She’s still great, but she’s now the latest generation of performer for moms who drive small SUVs, and her performance of neo-medieval style on a stage big enough for you and me to see is the death knell for the movement. For a historical pop culture equivalent, ask yourself who “got into fashion” or dressed in the neo-renaissance style after Madonna appeared at the 1990 VMAs .
So look for a mass-market-friendly version of the Middle Ages to hit the back-to-school racks at Target this summer, Abracadbra to be played at weddings, and cool kids to ditch the fairy wings and clown makeup for the next thing.
Did Kendrick Lamar jump the shark?
Speaking of things that were once cool… Kendrick Lamar!
During the famous Drake-Kendrick rap war, Drake didn’t have many good bars, but he did have one punch line that ultimately hit the mark. In the song ” Family Matters “, Drake raps: “Kendrick just opened his mouth; Someone give him a Grammy right now,” a line that plays on the excessive adulation Kendrick began receiving. Since then, Kendrick has performed at the Super Bowl, guested on a Playboi Carti album and won five Grammys. It wouldn’t be strange to hear “Not Like Us” being played in the same small SUV that just crashed into Abracadabra. As Drake’s line suggests: You can’t get that kind of popularity without saying hardcore, “Wait, is this guy actually corny ?”
Case in point: T-shirts . In Lamar’s TV Off , he shouts producer Mustard’s name in a way that seemed intended as memeification. As you’d expect, people started making and selling T-shirts from the era, like this early and popular version featuring Kendrick as the Peanuts character saying “Mustarddddd!”
Or this one from Etsy , which plays on the Heinz logo:
Then other people started noticing how basic all this equipment is and posting responses like this:
And this:
Is this normal or brain rot, the question is: “Who buys this crap?” Answer: People suck.
It’s not Kendrick’s fault that Etsy entrepreneurs are making a quick buck off his work, but in the cutthroat court of pop culture public opinion, K.Dot appears to be strapping on his jet skis and heading for the ramp.
What is the Great Meme Drought of 2025?
The third “thing that might end” is the memes themselves. TikToker @goofangel started by stating that there were no new original memes in March 2025.
Others have jumped on the bandwagon and started posting photos of the Great Depression to illustrate the supposed lack of memes:
Or express how the depression meme makes them feel:
Others have noted that the Great Depression meme is an original meme created in March, pointing out an important paradox in the meme-verse:
Still others looked to the future with a sense of hope:
“The Death of Memes” is ironic in many ways, but perhaps memes themselves have reached their logical conclusion and young people will start spending their time on something else. Of course, this is a pipe dream, but who knows.
Viral Video of the Week: I Accidentally Got Too Involved in This Movie on TikTok
My latest entry on the list of dead cultural things: cinema.
It’s nothing new that kids aren’t interested in movies anymore, but in a viral video this week, YouTuber Danny Gonzalez takes a look at what’s replacing traditional movies for more and more young people: long-form stories designed to be watched like videos on TikTok or Instagram. Movies likeTrue Heiress vs. Fake Queen Bee , an 85-part series (!) that tells the story of a high school heiress’ feud with a popular girl.
Gonzalez at one point wonders if the “movie” was actually written by an AI. So, as an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to write a movie with a similar idea, and I think it did at least as good a job as the actual True Heiress vs. Fake Queen Bee script. Here’s part of the first scene:
Lily passes a group of students who stop and look at her. One whispers to the other.
Student 1: Wait, who is this?
Student 2: I think…she’s like an heiress or something. Some big family with a lot of money.
Student 3 (sceptical): Heiress? Which… candy store?
Lily (overhearing, smiling): Actually, it’s a global luxury fashion brand. Just inherited a share last month. But thanks for noticing.