Kendrick Lamar’s Epic Super Bowl Win: The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture

This week’s biggest event was the Super Bowl. While the game was a snore-fest reminiscent of the lopsided Super Bowl blowouts of the past, the halftime show was nothing like the performances of 1980s Super Bowl favorites “Up with People.”

If you compare the two performances (and you should), you’ll see how far we have come as a society.

Kendrick’s jeans win the Super Bowl

Super Bowl 2025 may have been more of beatdown than an exciting football game, but luckily Kendrick Lamar was around at halftime to provide some much needed drama. From “Uncle” Samuel L. Jackson providing a preemptive critique of the show from “mainstream” America, to Serena Williams crip walking for more total yards than the Kansas City offense, to the copious Drake-baiting, plus some provocative, timely questions about what “America” means anyway, all of it performed in front of the sitting president himself, it was a lot.

But even still, Kendrick’s jeans stole the show.

Debates over jean length and style have been vital part of youth culture since forever, and K Dot’s choice of washed, boot-cut jeans—flares, even—marks a turning point. For the last few years, kids have been wearing huge, Jnco style jeans dug up from the mid-1990s, often accented with some chrome studs, but Kendricks “loose fit on top; wild at the ankles” style is destined to be the must-wear cut for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully kids will take note that Kendrick’s jeans are the right length, and not do that “so long it’s draggin’ on the ground” thing that was popular the last time people wore bell-bottoms. As for the future of jeans, look for the return of skinny jeans; it is inevitable.

“What’s a father?” memes take over the internet

Online wags recently rediscovered an old clip of an interview with deceased rapper XXXTentacion, and they have been turning out hilarious memes using it on X, TikTok, and everywhere else ever since. The original video was released in 2022 by TheFader. In it, XXX is asked “Do you have any relationship with your father?” He responds “What’s that? What’s a father?” and there’s something so performativly poignant about it—so real-but-so-fake—that the moment defines cringe.

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The internet piled on after the initial post on X, with the consensus that XXX was corny. Then there were attempts to recreate the clip as accurately as possible:

And lots of memes where XXXTentacion fails to understand other simple things, like showers and jobs.

What does “reheating your own nachos” mean?

“Reheating nachos” or “reheating your own nachos” is an evocative piece of slang that comes from online fandom and amateur cultural critics. It is used to refer to performers and/or artists, and it means something like “trying to recapture what was good about previous work.”

It’s usually meant as negative criticism—nachos are generally not nearly as delicious when reheated—but it’s possible to successfully reheat your own nachos too. For instance, many fans of Lady Gaga regard her new single “Abracadabra” as reheated nachos—it’s got the same electronic beats, wordplay, and catchy chorus of her best work—but it’s regarded as awesome by many, leading to the suggestion that she made the new nachos as delicious as the old ones and/or created new nachos from her old recipes. Like a good nacho cheese pull, it’s possible to stretch this concept pretty far.

What does “boombayah” mean?

The slang term “boombayah” is a euphemism for having sex, sometimes phrased like “doing the boombayah.” It’s used mostly online, often to defeat censorship algorithms, so it’s not the kind of word you’re likely to hear said aloud.

The word originated with K-Pop band BlackPink’s 2016 song of the same name but has only recently caught on widely, first within the fandom of Squid Game (thanks to this video), from whence it spread to everyone else.

Everyone hates “Influencer Smurf”

Few things engender as passionate a reaction as reboots of beloved childhood media. When the new version of the old thing is done well, people absolutely love it, like the reaction to the recent Super Mario Bros. movie. But when it’s done poorly, the vitriol is off-the-charts.

So it is with the upcoming Smurfs movie. The plot, in which the Smurfs have to enter the real world for some reason, is seen as lazy, obvious, and also the same as the story for the quite poor 2011 live action Smurfs movie. But there’s a special hatred for one character in the trailer: Influencer Smurf. His line in the trailer (“Smash that subscribe button!”) and his smug look are seen as the worst kind of pandering, and a desperate bid to create modern relevance in the most obvious way possible. “Influencer Smurf will lead to a catastrophic event in July,” sums up one Reddit poster.

On the positive side of The Smurfs reactions, people like the casting of John Goodman as Papa Smurf. So there’s at least something nice to say. There’s also the fact that Smurfs were never anything but horrible, and people only liked Smurfs in the first place because they were 5 years old. A new generations of 5-year-olds is primed to fall in love this summer when The Smurfs is released. Again.

Viral video of the week: Doug’s winter party

This week’s viral video is so wholesome you can’t help but love it. Taken by a Ring doorbell cam, Doug’s Winter Party documents 85 year-old Doug visiting his neighbor Michelle to invite her and her family to his party. “Hi, I’m Doug across the street over here,” Doug says. “This is an invite to a party on February 15. I didn’t want to leave it in the mailbox.”

That would be fairly cute—maybe a five on a 10-point adorability scale—but Michelle follows with a video showing off the paper invitation, where Doug writes the party is from “4 p.m. until the cops arrive.” That shoots it up to 11.

An invitation to Doug’s winter party is now the most coveted ticket in the world (or on the internet, anyway), with many angling for a spot on Doug’s guest list and trying to impress with the dance moves they’ll bring. We can all only hope that no weird strangers actually show up. Nobody wants that, least of all Doug.