Singing Together is a Highmark for a Friendship
I stand by my believe that watching a teenager smoke a tide pod (a dab no less), was the most punk rock thing I’ve ever seen. Confusing to anyone, including the person doing it and filming it (nobody smokes tide pods with the camera off), but most especially adults. It doesn’t get you high; its potentially deadly. To me what is so, I guess “punk” is inaccurate or imprecise but I mean it defies the faux-relatable, and often phoned-in “when I was your age I experimented too” response. Instead, it creates a genuine question. “Wait, what the fuck are you doing?”
It levels the playing field, nobody can say you are “acting out” or “chemically imbalanced,” most diagnosis seem irrelevant when you are in the hospital for smoking a tide pod.
My fascination was shared by many and “The Kids are Consuming Tide Pods” Zeitgeist spread in the same way Jenkem and its cultivation process became a real-life biohazard (i.e., the local news). To be fair, I’m not sure most had the genuine gall to smoke their tide pods, which I hate to admit, I find much cooler than eating a tide pod.
What a time, you had to be there I guess. Donald Trump was the president, which kind of made everything feel like the wheels had come off, but it was before he suggested that the sick consume liquid bleach to cure COVID-19.
For peak Millennials, this may have been a fairly formative interaction with Gen-Z. #SkibidiTidePod. But, I don’t really know that there was a fully codified and satirized tik tok lexicon from which to instantly discredit and belittle anything said by anyone born after Y2K.
Before Tik Tok, and the Chinese Government distracted any form of real substantive art - or at least drown it out under an endless torrent of trends, my exposure to youth culture is so selective that I find it mostly annoying rather than alarming. An outlier to this was my instant appreciation for the video game Splatoon.
Its definitely an attempt to capture market share with a younger demographic (nice!) and I’m not sure that this is actually what kids are into - but there are lots of things that I loved about Splatoon.
The total integration between game play/art design make it one of the most immersive and enjoyable experiences in recent memory. The premise is: After total ecological collapse, a new race of squid/octopus people have replaced humans, occupying the cities and establishing a new Squid Kid culture. In the game, you are on a team of 4 other Squidlings and you each have a device that covers the arena in paint. The team with the most paint covered after 3 minutes wins.
If you have friends that you can sing silly songs with, I suggest you do so.
Having the courage to sing freely with someone else is a highmark in a friendship.
