A Guide to Kids’ Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: Who’s the ‘final Boss of Ibiza’?
This week in pop culture, everyone is pointing and laughing. Gen Z has discovered the millennial music madness that everyone wants to forget, the entire internet is clowning over Ice Cube’s new movie, and TikTok is obsessed with “Ibiza’s final boss.” But no one is laughing at the four-year-olds who are hooked on their brains.
The final boss of Ibiza
There’s a new star on the internet: Ibiza Final Boss! This TikTok video was posted five days ago by the TikTok account of men’s clothing store Zero Six West and immediately went viral. It’s been viewed over 20 million times. This guy is simply mesmerizing. He has a bowl cut and his teeth are so white . How did he get those sharp lines of his goatee? Who gave him those tattoos? There’s something so specific and unique about his appearance that it’s hard to believe he’s a real person. But we know he is real because other accounts have started posting their own photos of Ibiza Final Boss, including this one:
and this:
And much more .
So: Ibiza is a Spanish island in the Mediterranean Sea, famous for its club scene. The final boss is the one you fight at the end of a video game. So we know where the final boss of Ibiza got his name, but who is he?
Soon, this TikTok account popped up that appears to belong to this man, but is it? And even if it is, Ibiza Final Boss only identifies himself as “Jack Kay” and doesn’t reveal any other information. Where is he from? What does he do in Ibiza? What does he do when he’s not partying? What does he dream about at night? We may never know.
Music “Top-clap-hey”
Gen Z has found a new way to poke fun at millennials, and I’m on board. Have you heard of “stomp clap hey”? It’s a derogatory nickname for a genre of pop-folk music that became popular around 2010, when earnest bands like Of Monsters and Men and Mumford and Sons blasted out of coffee shops and taverns with too much craft beer. I didn’t notice how lame it was at the time. I’d probably pay to see the Lumineers perform one day. But in hindsight, what was everyone thinking?
The title explains the structure of the songs: stomping, clapping, and shouting ” hey.” The person shouting “hey” definitely has a beard, probably wears suspenders, can play the banjo, and probably makes homemade pickles as a hobby.
Gen Z kids have rediscovered stomp-clap-hey, not in the “I found something cool from the past” sense, but in the “I can’t believe people liked that terrible music” sense. They seek out the most egregious examples just to laugh at them, like Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes’ performance on NPR’s Tiny Desk, which was brilliant in its bad taste and transcendent in its ridiculousness.
Everyone hates watching War of the Worlds
Media doesn’t have to be old to be hateful. Amazon’s War of the Worlds remake literally just came out, and it’s so bad everyone is watching it . Filmed during the pandemic and delayed until last week, War of the Worlds stars Ice Cube as a hacker working for a government surveillance system. As such, the film mostly consists of footage of Cube watching events unfold on his computer screen, as if he only agreed to the role if producers would let him stay in bed.
War had a perfect 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes until Entertainment Weekly ‘s Jordan Huffman raised the score to 3% .
This is a mind-bogglingly awful movie in every way. It’s consistently, relentlessly bad in so many new ways that it’s impossible not to watch it. Ice Cube’s computer clock is constantly bugged. The President calls Cube and says, “Let’s have this war of the worlds.” At the climax, a heroic Amazon driver buys an Amazon gift card.
As X user Lon Harris says, “Going below 5% on Rotten Tomatoes is basically as appealing to me as going above 90%. That’s something I definitely need to experience.”
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Children as young as four can recognize brain rot
The stomp-clap-ay music is undeniably lame, but the kids at Gen Alpha are doing something we don’t even understand . According to educator @halflifed, the four- and five-year-olds she teaches are completely immersed in mindless videos .
“They know what brain rot is. What it is. And they can recognize it,” she says. She says her students say “sigma” all day long. And “brother.” And they say “amunga” — a word that puzzles @halflifed, but I think it might be about the video game Among Us ?
“You don’t understand. There are 4 and 5 year olds who, as soon as they get internet access on their parents’ tablet or phone, they turn on YouTube Reels and sit there and scroll,” @halflifed says in the video, “and within 5 minutes they’re seeing these creepy AI videos of fire ants eating babies alive… and the kids are just so excited about it!”
For a deeper dive into AI-generated nightmare videos for kids, check out my post about AI-generated kitten horror videos on YouTube .
What are “Gunettes” and “Guners”?
If you’ve read my Gen Z and Gen A Slang Dictionary , you already know that “gooning” means prolonged masturbation without orgasm, sometimes with the goal of entering an altered state of consciousness. A gooner is a man who gangbangs. A goonette is a woman who gangbangs.