The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture: Why Is Lil Yachty in Poland?

Halloween is coming, and things are getting very weird. Rapper Lil Yachty is taking a walk to Poland, and TikTokers are putting pumpkins on their heads, buying all the skeletons on earth, and making their pets into demons. Oh, and NFT marketers are entering the TikTok-sphere to lie to kids about the metaverse.

Viral video of the week: Lil Yachty Poland (Music Video)

If you’re around young people this week, you will hear them singing about walking to Poland. The culprit is rapper Lil Yachty’s “Poland,” a dreamy ear-worm with a chorus that will drill right into your brain and live there until you too are also walking around chanting, “I took a woooock to Poland.” The “official” video, in which Yachty does, in fact, walk around in Poland, was released a half hour before I wrote this, but if doesn’t have a million hits in the next day, I’ll be shocked.

As for what the song means, there’s a double meaning in the word “walk/wock.” Wock is supposedly short for Wockhardt, a pharmaceutical company that makes codeine cough syrup. It makes a lot more sense when combined with the track’s leaned-out, warbly lo-fi vibe. But maybe I’m wrong and it’s just a great song about walking around in Eastern Europe. Check it out and decide for yourself.

TikTok gears up for Halloween

TikTok is celebrating the best holiday, Halloween, in its own special way. Below are three TikTok trends related to the spooky season.

Creator of the #PorcelainChallenge banned from TikTok

TikTok can’t take a joke. Sebastian Durfee, formerly known as @childprogeny, posted a video hyping The Porcelain Challenge, where kids are seen to smashing their parents’ antique china, grinding it into a powder, and snorting it. This is not a shocking new trend, though. It’s a joke, made better by other TikTokers who responded by seeding the video on Facebook, and making fake reports that TikTok was removing the videos because kids were being hurt.

In a case of life imitating jokes, TikTok really did ban Durfee from the site, remove videos with the hashtags, and even remove videos reporting that TikTok was removing videos. The message: Don’t try to be funny; TikTok is serious business.

Virtual strippers, the Metaverse, and NFTs collide in an unholy high-tech nightmare

I don’t usually cover anything in “The Metaverse,” because I don’t really understand what it is, and literally no one uses it, but this story is a Russian nesting doll of high-tech horribleness that’s at least five-levels deep. It’s like something out of a dystopian futurist’s worst acid trip, just too terrible to ignore. Let me try to explain:

TikTok videos (level one) are appearing that tell young men that they can make a ton of money if they become virtual (female) strippers in The Metaverse (level two). According to the ads, in order to sign up for the highly-paid virtual sex work, you must visit a Discord (level 3) server. Those who worm this far into the rotten apple eventually learn it’s a bait-and-switch when they are directed to another Discord channel that hypes some fly-by-night NFT project (level 4). This all takes place within the framework of Western Capitalism (level 5).

I can’t bear to think about the modern world any longer. Good bye. “I’m taking a woooooooock— to Poland.”