The Out-of-Touch-Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Lady Gaga and the Death of Neo-Medievalism

I try to write about emerging trends in this column, but this week I'm flipping the script, as they say, and taking a look at the end of four popular things: Neo-medievalism, Kendrick Lamar, memes, and movies are all in the process of being thrown into the garbage heap by young people.

Lady Gaga and the death of neo-medievalism

If you watched Lady Gaga's appearance on Saturday Night Live on March 8, you might not have known you were witnessing the end of a youth trend, the moment when neo-medievalism went from cool to commodity.

Along with hosting, Gaga played her new single "Abracadabra" for the SNL audience, and she was doing a lot. The song's pure pop hooks mixed with hard dance beats would have been at home on Gaga's 2008 release The Fame, so this is Lady Gaga reheating her own nachos. But there are much older nachos being reheated too: From the Gregorian chants of the background singers to Gaga's dancers rocking corpse paint and plague-doctor outfits, Gaga is dabbling in neo-medievalism, an aesthetic born in cutting-edge art and fashion circles that has been slowly oozing toward the mainstream over the last few years.

Maybe in response to the world devolving from globalism to warring regional powers, just like the Middle Ages, fashion designers like Hedi Slimane started dressing models in ren-faire style outfits made of leather to make them look like "moody princes." Meanwhile, outside-of-the-mainstream musicians like Dandelion Wine began adding drum machines and synths to Middle Ages-style melodies. The neo-medieval style is based on people's ideas of history, not the real article (I doubt a 13th century peasant from Hungary would know what to make of "Abracadabra") so it owes a debt to RPG video games, fantasy movies, and Dungeons and Dragons.

Over the last few years, neo-medievalism has become a whole thing. But the 1990s swing revival was a whole thing too, and all whole things die the way Big Bad Voodoo Daddy did: Too many people started paying attention, and what was once cool and underground becomes ridiculous and embarrassing.

You could see the cracks forming when Chappell Roan showed up at the Grammys looking like this:

But Roan is at least in her 20s. Lady Gaga is nearly 40 years old. She's still great, but she's a last-gen artist for moms driving small SUVs now, and her copping the neo-medieval style on a stage big enough for you and I to see it is a death knell for the movement. For a historical pop-culture equivalent, ask yourself who was "voguing" or dressing in a neo-Renaissance style after Madonna appeared on the VMAs in 1990.

So look for the mass-market-friendly version of the Middle Ages to hit the back-to-school clothing racks at Target this summer, for "Abracadbra" to be played at weddings, and for the cool kids to ditch the fairy wings and clown makeup for whatever the next thing is.

Has Kendrick Lamar jumped the shark?

Speaking of things that were once cool... Kendrick Lamar!

Drake didn't have many good bars during the famous Drake vs. Kendrick rap war, but he had one punchline that ended up landing hard. On "Family Matters," Drake raps, "Kendrick just opened his mouth; somebody hand him a Grammy right now," a line that plays on the oversized adulation Kendrick had started receiving. Since then, Kendrick performed at the Super Bowl, guested on Playboi Carti's album, and has been handed five Grammys. It wouldn't be weird to hear "Not Like Us" played in the same small SUV that just bumped "Abracadabra." As Drake's line suggests: You can't get this popular without the hardcore saying, "Wait, is this guy actually corny?"

Case-in-point: the T-shirts. On Lamar's "TV off," he shouts out the name of producer Mustard in a way that seemed designed to be meme-ified. As you could have predicted, people started making and selling T-shirts of the moment, like this early and popular version featuring Kendrick as a Peanuts character saying "Mustarddddddd!"

Or this one from Etsy, that plays on Heinz logo:

Credit: Etsy

Then other people started noticing how cornball all this gear is and posting responses like this:

And this:

Whether it's normal or brain-rot, the question is the same: "Who is buying this shit?" The answer: Lame people.

It's not Kendrick's fault that Etsy entrepreneurs are making a quick buck off his work, but in the pitiless court of public pop culture opinion, K.Dot seems to be strapping on the water skis and heading for the ramp.

What is the great meme drought of 2025?

For my third "thing that might be over," I'm looking at memes themselves. TikToker @goofangel started the ball rolling by proclaiming that there were no new, original memes in March of 2025.

Others picked up on the trend and started posting picture of the Great Depression to illustrate the supposed lack of memes:

Or expressing how the meme depression makes them feel:

Others have pointed out that the Great Meme Depression is an original meme that was created in March, identifying an important paradox in the meme-verse:

Still others looked to the future with a sense of hope:

The "death of memes" is mostly ironic, but maybe memes themselves have reached their logical conclusion and younger people will start doing something else with their time. It's a pipe dream, sure, but you never know.

Viral video of the week: I accidentally got way too invested in this TikTok movie

My final entry in the list of dead culture things: cinema.

That kids don't really care about movies any more isn't a new thing, but in this week's viral video, YouTuber Danny Gonzalez takes a look at what's replacing traditional films for more and more young people: long-form stories designed to be watched like TikToks or Instagram reels. Movies like "True Heiress vs. Fake Queen Bee," an 85-part(!) series that tells the story of a high school heiress's feud with a popular girl.

Gonzalez wonders at one point whether the "movie" was actually written by AI. So, as an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to write a movie with a similar idea, and I think it did at least as good a job as the actual "True Heiress vs. Fake Queen Bee" script. Here's part of the first scene:

Lily walks past a group of students who pause and stare at her. One whispers to another.

Student 1: Wait, who is that?

Student 2: I think... she’s, like, an heiress or something. Some big family with loads of money.

Student 3 (skeptical): An heiress? To what, like... a candy store?

Lily (overhearing, with a smile): Actually, it’s a global luxury fashion brand. Just inherited a stake last month. But thank you for noticing.