The kids are alright

When I still worked at an afterschool, I was constantly in awe of modern youth culture; and the fact that I’m even old enough to say the phrase “modern youth culture”. One of my last weeks teaching, I had a student in a class explain a recent Tiktok trend: the Notti bop.

The dance was named after 14-year-old drill rapper Notti Osama, who, like many other artists in the style, creates diss tracks to taunt your rivals. Sadly and unsurprisingly, this can also coincide with gang affiliation and violence. And for Notti, it did.

(or, in this case, knives)

About a year ago, he got caught up in a street fight with opposing gang members and was fatally stabbed to death, and that incident was then referenced in a new track, the Notti bop. The track accompanied a dance where one makes flinging and frenetic gestures at their waist to signify the area where the kid was stabbed. The student at my job who told this to me did so with a smile on her face. She said he was “stupid and deserved to die”. I replied that, although I’ve seen my fair share of unsafe things online, this was the most messed up thing I’d heard in a while. Kids killing each other. Kids dancing to mock or celebrate the death of other kids. It fucked me up, not gonna lie. Still does.

We’re in an artificial world where there is a forced deficit of love. Loving adults with low-paying full time jobs can’t devote the time to give their children all they desire. Unloving or toxic people can become parents too, and sometimes these people use their own children tools or toys in their manipulations or schemes. I saw it often at that job. Some hugs can communicate a lot more than just “Hey! I’m happy to see you”. Sometimes they say “You’re the only person I feel safe with” or “help me, please”. I think that’s something a lot of teachers can relate to: the feeling of “why am I your favorite? I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, I just showed you I care.” Unfortunately, that is pretty rare in an economy devoid of care. And the care is a cycle that bends inward on itself. This takes the form of a low ability to stay focused on one thing for a long time… which brings me to… Tiktok.

I’m very willing to say Tiktok makes me feel old and [more than] a little afraid. When I taught summer school, I walked into a classroom to see if students would be interested in going outside to garden, and stumbled into a room full of middle schoolers listening to Tiktok mashups. If you are truly bold, click the link. This. Shit. Sucks. It’s 20 second clips of hundreds of songs, the most viral parts of them, played over and over— It’s the sonic landscape of the scroll without the scroll, and my ears recieved it with all the pleasure of a dull buzzsaw. Sheeeeesh. I do not like to make a habit of berating kids for things I don’t understand, because it ages me like milk before their very eyes, but I just couldn’t handle this.

Music’s artistry is in its ability to bend time, make a moment stand still in its tracks, to hold you in a feeling, or express broad histories, deep relationships or struggles; this can even be true for a pop track that only lasts a minute thirty, or a government-funded hour-long multi-part piece of chamber music. To this end, I thought— what of the tiktok mashup? What good does it do to fill your ears with only a fraction of a total piece of music? I bet the artists who made them, as superficial as they could possibly be, would probably prefer you sit through the whole thing, right? But maybe it is the dissatisfaction inherent in social media that pushes us towards this genre of youtube video. Don’t like it? Swipe left… right?

Does social media not ask us to be incessantly dissatisfied? To always be looking for more, or something different? Otherwise, you’d watch every video that lands on your feed! But somehow we know it’s quantity over quality.

And yes, there are plenty of things wrong with tiktok that more qualified people could lecture you about. Trends that seem specifically designed to harm people have arisen out of this platform and its particularly fame-hungry users; many city dwellers and suburbanites for example, are well aware of the Kia Boyz. But despite the bad, millions of people stay on Tiktok. Most people I know who use it, love it. They say “it’s such a great educational tool” and “I just like finding recipes on there”, which I’m sure is true. That’s fine. They’re adults.

But I fear for the kids that are on it. Even casual users, but especially children who spend hours and hours on it a day. I’m wary about the trends made by kids for kids, but I’m specifically (maybe morbidly) curious about the trends made by adults, aimed at children. Ones that often explicitly harm real kids in real time. I also worry because it’s easier than ever to get pulled into social media apps like Tiktok and never cut yourself off, furthering the disassociation of a youth culture that already struggles with socialization and independent critical thinking. But I worked with kids. And I know, that sometimes, compared to adults, kids often do think more critically— quicker too. But even still, most kids are on social media, for better or worse.

Is it that they need to be shown an alternative, healthy side of the social platform? Would it matter even if they knew it was there? Will the Bill Nye’s of the New Internet* be enough to save young developing minds from being the playthings of influencers, advertisers, and tech giants? Time will tell.

(*I’m going to be honest, I put “Mr Beast is the New Bill Nye” into my search engine to see what came up, and it was this. A video homemade by 10 year olds with 21 views. Perfection.)

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But despite my worrying, I still think most kids are doin’ alright. They’re bright. They’re funny, and kind. They tend to bear with life, as shitty as it can be sometimes. It’s through this lens I can understand the Notti Bop. Maybe dancing to a song mocking the lost life of a young soul makes a lot of sense in a world that is so callous and cruel to your kind.

I’d like to end with a video I really love. It’s about getting old. Or rather, thinking about being older, wiser, or better than whosoever’s called “young”, AKA the place I currently reside. **

**For clarity, I do not think I’m better than the youth, I just know I’m gettin’ old.

It’s worth a watch, even if you’re not a huge fan of the front-facing-white-guy-explaining-things-to-you genre of YouTube. From an outward-facing white girl from her keyboard that’s missing it’s F key*: See you next time, fam.

*I have since gotten a new computer, don’t worry.

Love yall~