The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: What Is Viking Rap?

A weekly deep dive into the current trends, slang, and viral videos of youth culture in terms that even the squarest can understand.

This week's Out-of-Touch guide takes us from the frozen wastelands of ancient Scandinavia to Alabama courtrooms, with side quests to examine hometown nostalgia and the peculiar love Gen Z has for clowns.

What is "Viking rap"?

The newest trend in music online is videos of Vikings rapping. Clips from fake artists with names like "Viggo Ironside" and "Ragalor" are rapidly proliferating on TikTok and other places where videos are shared. The vibe is aggressive beats and bars about Valhalla, longships, tattered flags, and wolves. The visuals are usually of muscular blonde people with tattoos in a studio doing their thing, like this:

The only other setting these Viking rappers seem to inhabit are concerts, particularly ironic given that no one will ever actually see these "artists" perform live:

The most famous Viking rapper is Draugr Balled, who was the first to really solidify the whole Viking rap genre. Balled's videos regularly earn millions of views, and you can listen to this music on legit streaming services if you want to never hang out with me.

Judging from the hundreds of comments these videos inspire ("Just wasting water," "Reposted by every 45yr old divorced dad," etc.) Kids regard Viking rap as extremely cringe, so it seems like a guilty pleasure, the kind of thing you wouldn't admit that you like, even if you secretly dig it.

For the record: Actual Vikings probably didn't have tattoos, but Viking women were generally less subjugated than women in other civilizations of the time period. Actual Vikings were also into "flyting," verse-based insult battles that seem a lot like freestyle rap battles, so there's a little historical precedent for these videos. Anyway, check out the "vikinghiphop" hashtag if you actually want to listen to more of this kind of thing. Just don't tell anyone you like it.

What is a side quest?

As I'm sure you know, a side quest in a video game is a quest that is not necessary to completing the game's main objective. In slang, a side quest is anything you do just to do it. If going to college is your quest, a side quest might be finding the underground tunnels everyone talks about, or taking an outside-your-major elective like Fencing 101 just because it looks interesting.

TikTok rolls out age restrictions

Big news for kids out of Alabama this week, where a court settlement may change how every kid in the U.S. uses social media. TikTok's parent company ByteDance agreed to pay Alabama over $100 million dollars to end a lawsuit claiming TikTok is designed to keep kids addicted to the platform. TikTok will also implement a two-hour daily usage limit for children, overnight and school-hour restrictions, and ban the use of cosmetic filters on kids' accounts. Underage users will also receive an interruption after 15 minutes of TikTok use, and additional pauses at 60 and 90 minutes.

While these restrictions only apply to Alabama, this is only the first state settlement of what will likely be many. There are 27 similar suits working through the court systems in other states. The likely result will be nationwide guidelines for all social media. Meta, having recently settled a federal suit, has already implemented two-hour daily time limits for young users of Facebook and Instagram and is urging it competitors to do the same. Because navigating a patchwork of state laws is not easy for tech companies, big platforms are likely to adopt the strictest state requirements as a universal standard.

What are "how I feel in my hometown" memes?

I love when young people use new tools to express age-old emotions in novel ways. That's what "How I Feel in My Hometown" memes are about. You choose a fictional character, usually from an anime, to represent yourself and place 'em in scenes representing your hometown to capture that unique and melancholic sense of being a stranger in your birthplace, or having outgrown the place and seeing it with a different set of eyes. Here's an example, where Madoka Kaname contrasts with a small town:

and here's an anime character called Marin Kitagawa from My Dress-Up Darling in a Midwest town:

Another layer of irony comes from the song many memers use to accompany the video, That's My Kind of Night by Luke Bryan, an unapologetic pop-country ode to small-town life. You don't even have to know who Megumi Fushiguro from Jujutsu Kaisen is to get how he'd feel about hanging out at Texas Buc-ee's:

Viral video of the week: I accidentally found the origins of the "propeller hat"

YouTuber BouncyClown's examination of the origin of the propeller hat "only" has about 150,000 views, so it isn't the most viral video this week, but it's a really interesting story and it's indicative of a growing trend among young people: They're really into clowns.

Clowncore is a whole thing, whether it's people doing a modern take on the "evil clown" aesthetic pioneered by the Insane Clown Posse in the last generation, kids celebrating happy clowns in general, or folks like BouncyClown who take things in a new direction by combining clown-stuff with the kind of quirky pop-culture history YouTube is known for.

To get speculative for a minute, the popularity of clowns and clowncore among young people seems like a reaction to how stultifying it is to live in a world where everyone is perfect on social media, and "cringe" is the greatest crime. It's rebellion in pancake makeup. Clowncore folks are saying, "Fuck trying to be beautiful. I'm going to make myself look as ridiculous as possible and just have fun." I'm no clown guy, but I stand behind the message 100 percent.