Kids these days. They love listening to rappers who threaten to reenact the Columbine High School massacre.
On Monday, Jezebel launched their Teen Week (it’s like Shark Week, only better!) with an article devoted to breakout teen star Lil Yachty, complete with reviews from real teens.
“When we asked what they liked about them, a lot of the teenagers in attendance mentioned Yachty’s positivity... seemed to view him as a beacon of wholesome, confident placidity—a convenient antidote,” gushed staff writer Ellie Shechet and pop culture reporter Hazel Cills.
While in some of his more recent songs the rapper has endorsed a less substance-based lifestyle than most of his colleagues, his debut song (and, subsequently, his most streamed song on Spotify with more than 370 million listens), Broccoli, begins with these lyrics: “Touch my gang we gon’ turn this sh*t to Columbine.”
A reference to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre? Gee, that’s a real win for positivity and wholesomeness. And his new album, released this year, specifically targets teens,with the title Teenage Emotions.
One wonders if his teen audience even knows what it’s listening to. A 13-year-old girls interviewed by Jezebel said, “It’s hard to relate to rappers now because most of them, all they talk about is women or drugs or stuff like that. . . But with him, he talks about his life and being a teen.”
Um, ALL of his songs explicitly detail what the rapper would do to women. One even has a line about the rapper being involved with “six whores.” Somehow, these kids missed that reference. The only somewhat ‘relatable’ lyric given is the one solitary line in the song Priorities, where he chants, “F*ck school and f*ck the rules.”
The real question is, why does Jezebel find any artist who is centered on drugs, violence and graphic sex relatable to young teens?
