This week's trip into the hidden world of younger people features a new drug cocktail, moldy food from Mr. Beast, Halloween trends and way more. So get yourself a spoonful of pink cocaine and read on.
What exactly is pink cocaine?
After One Direction singer Liam Payne died, the initial toxicology report revealed the 31-year-old pop star had “pink cocaine” in his system. This led many to ask, “the hell is pink cocaine?”
According to The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, pink snow or pink cocaine is slang for a powdered mixture that usually contains some combination of ketamine, MDMA, meth, opioids, and other substances; it’s basically like mixing all the sodas at the soda machines together. It’s also called “tusi,” a reference to the 2C series of psychedelics, although drug experts say pink snow rarely contains any 2C chemicals. It rarely contains cocaine either (I assume because that shit is expensive) and it’s not pink. The color comes from food dye. The effects of snorting the substance is unknowable, because it could have literally anything in it.
Medical experts generally frown on taking unknown mixtures of psychoactive chemicals, and regard pink cocaine as particularly dangerous because it’s often a mix of uppers and downers. As Bridget Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor for New York, told NBC News, “If you have a drug that’s telling your heart to speed up and another drug that’s telling your heart to slow down, that’s a problem.” (A problem for squares, maybe.)
Lunchly release marred by mold
A couple weeks ago, this column reported on the launch of super-influencer Mr. Beast’s prepackaged lunch product Lunchly. It’s not going well. No one has reported being poisoned (yet), but according to online taste testers, Lunchly is moldy.
The word initially came from YouTuber/foodie Rosanna Pansino, who discovered the moldy meal when doing a comparison between Lunchly and Lunchables. This led to others online posting their own moldy Lunchly videos. The mold seems to form on the cheese, hilarious given Lunchly’s brags that it contains “real cheese.” Turns out real cheese is harder to keep shelf stable than the cheese food in competing insta-meals.
So far, Mr. Beast hasn’t responded to the “your food is, like, moldy, bro” controversy. If I were him, I’d offer a scathing response calling critics a bunch of weaklings. I'd be like, "Everyone is always whining about processed food having too many preservatives, right? Well this is the kind of thing that happens when food doesn’t have enough preservatives, so you whiners should shut up and eat your damn mold." (There is a reason I didn’t go into crisis PR.)
What does “fein” mean?
If you’re perplexed about why the young people around you keep using the word “fein,” be confused no more: It is a shortened and misspelled version of “fiend,” and it generally refers to a person who is enthusiastic about something. The popularity of the word can be traced partly to Travis Scott and Playboy Carti’s collab “FE!N," and partly to this viral video of a bunch of kids screaming along to the chorus at a concert.
Three Halloween trends: Dumb Ahh pumpkins, vintage decor, and ‘Hey wake up. I’m dead, remember?’
It’s the spooky season; here are three ways that young people are marking this special time of year and making Halloween their own.
Dumb Ahh pumpkins: The hottest trend in Jack o’ lanterns this year is the “dumb ahh pumpkin,” i.e., a gourd carved to look like the smiling buck toothed emoji. (“Dumb ahh” is a way of saying “dumb ass.”). Once you’ve carved your dumb ahh pumpkin, you take a video to post on TikTok. Here are some examples.
Vintage Halloween decor: Hipster and hipster-adjacent young people are eschewing the elaborate, animatronic modern Halloween decorations you can get at Home Depot in favor of vintage Halloween decorations like dye-cut cardboard ghosts and witches, “melted popcorn” decorations, and those light-up plastic pumpkins. A lot of retro-style decorations can be bought new, but it’s obviously cooler to have real '70s, '80s, and '90s pieces.
"Hey, wake up. I’m dead, remember?": This meme template isn’t explicitly Halloween, but it’s spooky and death-related, and that’s for me. So far, over 266,000 videos have been made using this spooky little piano riff, many of them featuring videos of someone who nearly shuffled off this mortal coil with explainer-text of how they nearly died like, “Wake up, I died a year ago. No one believed me when I said I was getting stalked.” They’re sad and creepy, and that we have no way of knowing if these things happened make them even creepier!
Minecraft is just amazing. The game was released in 2009, and users are still finding unique ways to use it for creativity. The latest fad is the MCAA, or Minecraft College Football, where users create video clips of fictional football highlights using Minecraft. The earliest video I can find of the trend dates back to July, and since then, lore has developed including a bitter rivalry between Pig State and Ole Moo, the emergence of Creeper A&M and Villager Tech, and many stadium bombings (creepers are suspected.)
Viral videos of the week: Tyler the Creator’s “St. Chroma” and “Noid”
This week features two viral videos by rapper Tyler the Creator. Released in advance of the October 28 release date for Tyler’s next album CHROMAKOPIA, the kids are flipping out over these videos, to the tune of over 16 million views collectively in a week or so, and they’re already calling the new Tyler release a “generational album” (even though it hasn’t come out yet). A new Tyler album is one of those increasingly rare shared cultural events for young people, and it’s cool that the excitement is over something that’s actually good. “Noid” is a paranoiac video/song about the terrifying nature of fame, featuring a blistering guitar riff sampled lifted from 1970s Zambian rocker Paul Ngozi, and “St. Chroma” is a brief snippet of a synth-drenched march.
