A Guide to Kids’ Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: What Is Viking Rap?
In this episode of “Out of Touch,” we travel from the snowy wastelands of ancient Scandinavia to the courtrooms of Alabama, and embark on additional missions exploring nostalgia and Gen Z’s unique love of clowns.
What is “Viking rap”?
The latest trend in online music is videos of Vikings rapping. Clips from fake artists with names like ” Viggo Ironside ” and ” Ragalor ” are quickly spreading on TikTok and other video-sharing platforms. The vibe is aggressive beats and lyrics about Valhalla, longships, tattered flags, and wolves. The visuals typically feature muscular, tattooed blondes in a studio, going about their business, like this:
The only other place these Viking rappers seem to perform is at concerts, which is especially ironic considering no one will ever see these “artists” live:
The most famous Viking rapper is Draugr Baled , who was the first to truly establish the entire Viking rap genre. Baled’s videos regularly receive millions of views, and you can listen to his music on legal streaming services if you don’t want to talk to me.
Judging by the hundreds of comments these videos generate (“Just a waste of water,” “Reposted by all the 45-year-old divorced dads,” etc.), kids find Viking rap utterly ridiculous, so it seems to be a sort of secret pleasure, something you won’t admit to even if you secretly enjoy it.
By the way: real Vikings probably didn’t have tattoos , but Viking women were generally less enslaved than women in other civilizations of the time. Real Vikings were also into ” flying “—verbal battles with insults, very similar to freestyle rap battles, so there’s some historical precedent for these videos. Anyway, check out the hashtag “vikinghiphop” if you want to listen to something similar. Just don’t tell anyone you like it.
What is a side quest?
As you probably know, a side quest in a video game is a task that’s not required to complete the game’s main objective. In slang, a side quest is any action you take simply for the sake of it. If your goal is getting into college, a side quest might be finding those underground tunnels everyone’s talking about, or taking an elective course unrelated to your major, like Fencing 101, just because it seems fun.
TikTok introduces age restrictions
This week, important developments for children took place in Alabama : a court settlement could change the way every child in the US uses social media. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, agreed to pay Alabama over $100 million in settlements to resolve a lawsuit alleging that TikTok is designed to make children addicted to the platform. TikTok will also impose a two-hour daily usage limit for children, restrictions on use at night and during school hours, and ban the use of beauty filters on children’s accounts. Users under 12 will also receive a cutoff after 15 minutes of TikTok use, with additional cutoffs after 60 and 90 minutes.
While these restrictions apply only to Alabama, this is only the first state-level settlement of many that are likely to follow. Twenty-seven similar lawsuits are pending in other states. The likely outcome will be nationwide regulations for all social media platforms. Meta, which recently settled a federal lawsuit, has already implemented two-hour daily limits on Facebook and Instagram use for young users and is urging its competitors to do the same. Because navigating the disparate set of state laws is challenging for tech companies, major platforms will likely adopt the strictest state requirements as a universal standard.
What are “How I Feel in My Hometown” memes?
I love it when young people use new tools to express old emotions in original ways. That’s what “How I Feel in My Hometown” memes are all about. You choose a fictional character, usually from anime, to represent yourself and place them in scenes depicting your hometown to convey that unique and melancholy feeling of alienation in your hometown, or the sense of having outgrown a place and seeing it through new eyes. Here’s an example contrasting Madoka Kaname with a small town:
Here’s an anime character named Marin Kitagawa from the animated series “My Darling Who Loves to Dress Up,” who lives in a small town in the Midwest:
Another layer of irony is contained in the song many meme creators use to accompany the video: Luke Bryan’s “That’s My Kind of Night,” an uncompromising pop-country ode to small-town life. You don’t even need to know who Megumi Fushiguro from Jutsu Kaisen is to understand how he’d feel if he stopped by a Buc-ee’s in Texas:
Viral Video of the Week: I Accidentally Discovered the Origin of the “Propeller Hat”
YouTuber BouncyClown ‘s video exploring the origins of the propeller hat has only garnered around 150,000 views, so it’s not the most viral video of the week, but it’s a really interesting story, and it’s indicative of a growing trend among young people: they really love clowns.
Clowncore is a movement in its own right, whether it’s a modern take on the “evil clown” aesthetic pioneered by Insane Clown Posse a generation ago, childhood celebrations of hilarious clowns in general , or groups like BouncyClown who are forging a new direction by combining clown themes with the quirky pop culture history YouTube is known for.
If we imagine it a bit, the popularity of clowns and clowncore among young people seems to be a reaction to how depressing it is to live in a world where everyone is perfect on social media and cringe is the greatest crime. It’s rebellion in makeup form. People who embrace clowncore say, “Fuck trying to be pretty. I’m going to look as ridiculous as possible and just have fun.” I’m not a clown, but I 100 percent support that message.