Kendrick Lamar’s ‘GNX’: The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture

This week we take a look at Kendrick Lamar’s surprise new album, delve into the world of banned brainrot words in classrooms, find out what “jugging” means, and look at how easy it is to grift people with a cryptocurrency. What a world!

Why is everyone talking about Kendrick Lamar’s GNX?

On Friday at noon, with no warning, rapper Kendrick Lamar dropped a 12-track album across streaming services. To paraphrase a line from Kendrick’s “Not Like Us,” sometimes, you gotta pop out and show neighbors, and that’s what Lamar’s doing with GNX. It’s a dizzying musical journey with nods to everything from mariachi to retro-soul to smooth jazz to 90s Los Angeles G-funk, and lyrics with that so-dense-and-so-hype flow that makes Lamar the greatest rapper alive. It’s an early Christmas present we probably don’t deserve.

GNX is the only thing in youth culture (really just culture) that matters this week. It’s a rare shared event for fractured times. If you want to understand where young people’s heads are right now, go on Spotify and listen to this album. Here are only some of the ripples emanating from the boulder Kendrick dropped in the cultural lake:

• According to Spotify, “Squabble Up” has been streamed 20 million times in the first three days of release.

• The world was introduced to AzChike, Lefty Gunplay, Peysoh, and YoungThreat among others. Along with “haven’t heard of ’em” LA rappers, Lamar also collaborated on three tracks with 49-year old mariachi singer Deyra Barrera. He saw her perform at the first game of the world series a few weeks ago, and was in the studio a few days later recording vocals.

• The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and everyone else has reacted with varying levels of “it’s really, really good.”

• Kendrick’s friend-turned-enemy Drake reacted by not reacting. Given their history, probably a good move.

• Everyone on the Internet seized on Lamar yelling “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 hopped onto the trend, but so did Lizzo. DJ Mustard responded on X with “Dot!!!!” (Lamar is also known as K-Dot) which I find heartwarming. But my favorite mustaaaaard meme so far demonstrates what happens when you don’t put the right condiment on Kendrick’s hot dog:

Viral video of the week: “Squabble Up”

If you’re like “I really don’t care about Kendrick Lamar,” sorry, because Kendrick also released a new video for the song “Squabble Up” this morning, and it’s viral like H1N1: The video was played over one and half million times in only a couple of hours.

Like Kendrick’s music, the video, directed by Calmatic, is joyous, deep, personal-but-universal, enigmatic, powerful, and—look, you just need to watch it. It’s packed with imagery that begs for interpretation, with references to scraper bikes, Ice-T’s 1988 album Power, the “scramble board” from Soul Train, Isaac Hayes’ 1971 album Black Moses, and 8,000 other things I’m not cool enough to recognize. Look for months, maybe years, of interpretation, theories, and bad takes on this video. Or just nod your head to it for a few minutes.

What does “jugging” mean?

Shifting gears from Art to slang, let’s look at the word “jugging.” It means stealing. The term is gaining popularity on TikTok along with the”-uzz” slang that’s rotting brains lately. Like most current slang, it originally comes from AAVE.

This week in brainrot: banned-word lists and .pdf-to-brainrot programs

Being an educator has never been an easy job, but it must be particularly trying in the current cultural moment when we’ve jettisoned even the pretext of caring about intellectual matters, they’re talking about abolishing the Department of Education, and the kids are speaking in brainrot. But look on the bright side, teachers: You can make funny memes out of it. Know your meme has collected 18 viral photos of classroom banned words list. All the usual suspects are here: Skibidi, rizz, gyatt, sigma, etc. and it gives a look into the unique challenges of education in 2024. If I were a teacher, I’d give up!

But some people are more hopeful (maybe) as evidenced by the various online study sites popping up offering “.PDF to brainrot” utilities that aim to make studying more relatable by translating any text you’d like into a “brainrot video.” I’m highly suspicious about the effectiveness of this strategy, but what do I know? I took a deeper dive into this trend, by the way.

This week in grifting: pump-and-dump scam backfires

Let’s close things out with a look at a crypto currency scam, wanna? Earlier this week, a member of Gen Z or maybe Gen A decided to have some fun with the collective concept of “value” by creating his own cryptocurrency. This can be done by anyone with a few hundred bucks, and it takes about eight seconds. Shouldn’t be an issue because a digital currency has no value unless other people believe it does, so make all the meme coins you want, what can it hurt? This young entrepreneur, though, live-streamed the creation of his meme coin on the site pump.fun, and something about him caused enough people to purchase his coin to give it value. A few hours later, Gen Z Kid sold his 51M shares for $30,000. Total profit: $29,600 for a couple hours of “work.”

The only profit went to the kid, though. The other “investors” who ponied up for the coin were left holding a digital bag of worthless coins. Pumping and dumping has been around since markets existed, and this is not even close to the biggest “rug pull” in cryptocurrency, but it’s notable for the age of the puller—young enough that his financial misdeeds supposedly ended after someone told his mom what he was up to—and for the ending of the story.

Perhaps it was the two middle fingers the kid threw up on his stream as he was pulling the rug out from under investors, but the story gained enough traction in the world of “meme-coin investors” (a real thing!) that people wanted revenge. Along with telling his mom, internet weirdos bought enough of the now-worthless coin to send the price to the proverbial moon. The original scammers’ shares would have reportedly been worth $4,000,000 if he had held onto them. That will show him!

Except, if he had kept the coins, there would be no “little kid scams people; let’s get him!” narrative to inflate their value, so he wouldn’t have made any extra money. In fact, that “let’s get revenge” story was a much more successful “pump” than the youngster’s original scheme, leading to the speculation (on my part anyway) that the larger pump-and-dump was the goal all along, and the “kid who stole the money” was a head-fake from the start.

I can’t bear to think about the modern world anymore. I’m looking for an ice floe I can ride into the ocean now.