How “hen banana” explains Gen Alpha tradition

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My husband was selecting up our older child from faculty just a few weeks again when he overheard a trainer issuing an exasperated directive to her class:

“No extra chickens! No extra hen banana!”

Although it would sound absurd to the untrained ear, my husband knew precisely what she meant, as a result of the phrases “hen banana” have been reverberating via our residence for months.

It’s not simply us. When Gabe Dannenbring , a trainer and content creator in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, requested his seventh-grade college students in regards to the phrase not too long ago, “Each single one in every of them harmonized ‘hen banana’ at the very same time,” he advised me.

“Simply final week, I used to be strolling round a mall right here in Los Angeles, and a small child was hopping round and singing it to himself,” mentioned BJ Colangelo, a media theorist and analyst, in an electronic mail.

“Rooster banana” hasn’t fairly reached the ubiquity of “ 6-7 ,” the Gen Alpha catchphrase that has made all of it the way in which to 10 Downing Street . However I needed to jot down about it as a result of it’s in the midst of what’s turning into a standard trajectory, from novelty music to TikTok pattern to all-purpose adult-tormenting meme. The rise of hen banana exhibits how social media influences tradition even amongst children too younger to have social media. It reveals the rising overlap between AI-generated content material and wholly human silliness. And it’s a reminder that if child tradition appears absurd — nicely, it’s presupposed to.

The historical past of “hen banana”

The juxtaposition of “hen” with “banana” calls to thoughts AI-generated brain rot icons like Ballerina Cappuccina , a smiling espresso cup with a dancing human physique. Certainly one of Dannenbring’s college students even described it as “like AI slop however for phrases,” the trainer advised me.

However actually, the catchphrase stems from a techno-inflected earworm of the identical identify, launched final February by a Swedish (and human) manufacturing group working below the identify Loopy Music Channel.

“It simply got here up in one in every of our talks,” Michel Petré, CEO of the label MTM Music AB, advised me. “You realize, let’s simply put the hen and banana collectively.”

A video launched on the identical time contains a hen head on a banana physique, a hen pizza with banana slices spinning on a turntable, and — why not? — an alien hand dialing a cellphone.

“With all of the dangerous issues occurring everywhere in the world,” Petré mentioned, “we needed to do one thing humorous that folks may snort at.”

The music quickly impressed a global dance trend on TikTok and Instagram, with everybody from 60-something Englishwomen to Bollywood stars becoming a member of in. Like so many social media fads, it might need ended there — “I attempted to only wave my hand at it as a type of flash-in-the-pan developments,” Colangelo mentioned.

As a substitute, “hen banana” unfold out from TikTok and down the age ladder. One New York Metropolis fourth-grader turned aware of the phrase as a result of “the boys saved saying it” at her faculty, she advised me. She’s by no means seen a TikTok that includes the music, however right now she's going to utter the phrase “if I’m excited, or if I hear any individual say ‘hen banana,’ or if I simply need to,” she mentioned.

Like “6-7” or “ skibidi ,” “hen banana” doesn’t actually have a which means, however it may be used to precise a wide range of emotional states. “I heard somebody say it in a extremely unhappy voice, like, Aww, hen banana ,” Dannenbring mentioned.

Explaining the time period’s enchantment is sort of as arduous as defining it. “It’s simply humorous,” the fourth-grader mentioned. “Rooster and banana are, like, two completely various things.”

How developments unfold via Gen Alpha

“Rooster Banana” is way from the primary novelty music to change into successful with children. Petré pointed to “Child Shark,” the 2010s song-and-dance phenomenon that dominates day care playlists to this present day (right here I have to advocate “ Wedding in the Sea ,” the spinoff by which Grandpa Shark renews his vows together with his “outdated shark bride”).

Neither is it uncommon for a single phrase to return unfastened from its context and enter children’ cultural lexicon. Children within the 2000s cherished yelling “WASSUP” even when they’d by no means seen a Budweiser commercial , Colangelo factors out.

“Their objective is, actually, simply to confuse older folks, and so they put on that as a badge of honor.”

— Gabe Dannenbring, trainer and content material creator in Sioux Falls, South Dakota Now, nonetheless, the pathway from supply materials to classroom chaos is quicker and extra environment friendly. Earlier than social media, “if your mates or household didn’t suppose one thing was humorous, you’d in all probability cease repeating it quicker since you didn’t have anybody who shared that humorousness,” Colangelo mentioned. “Now, you'll be able to take a look at a cellphone and see hundreds, if not tens of millions, of individuals throughout the globe who do discover it humorous sufficient to repeat advert nauseam, which then validates your personal humorousness.”

Dannenbring worries that the pace and ubiquity of social media developments can put strain on children to leap on or be left behind. A number of children could not know what phrases like “hen banana” imply, he mentioned (in the event that they imply something in any respect): “They only say it as a result of they understand it’s of their world. It’s what it takes to be cool now.”

However there’s additionally a extra joyful, anarchic aspect to “hen banana.” It’s foolish, it’s weird, and yelling it out in school permits children — not adults — to manage the narrative for a minute, even when that narrative begins and ends with a barnyard animal teaming up with a fruit to make techno music.

“Rooster banana” is a non secular sibling of “ chicken jockey ,” the area of interest Minecraft character whose look within the current film turned younger folks’s cue to trigger mayhem. That film succeeded, Colangelo told me on the time, as a result of it was actually made for Gen Alpha children, not for grownups — and screaming and throwing issues when the hen jockey appeared was a method these children made the viewing expertise their very own.

“Youngsters are a marginalized demographic and are denied autonomy in so many features of their lives, in favor of what their mother and father need for them,” Colangelo mentioned this week. “As kids come into their very own personalities, they change into determined for something that feels ‘theirs.’”

If adults are befuddled and even mad, that’s a part of the purpose. “Their objective is, actually, simply to confuse older folks, and so they put on that as a badge of honor,” Dannenbring mentioned. “It’s like their very own language.”

Mind rot springs everlasting

Nobody I spoke with for this story may predict with any confidence what the following chicken-banana-style pattern can be. “A yr in the past, for those who would have mentioned ‘hen banana’ can be the pattern — like, what?” Dannenbring laughed. “It’s like a mad lib.”

Loopy Music Channel, nonetheless, is hoping to catch lightning in a bottle a second time with “ Techno Duck ,” launched simply final week. The accompanying video is much more absurd than “Rooster Banana,” that includes a fish enjoying a sax solo and a camel floating on a cloud. The clip additionally features a notable picture: two cat heads flanking a keyboard, which sails via a background of stars and galaxies.

The lip-synching felines recall Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat , two iconic millennial memes recognized and prized for his or her absurdity (Nyan Cat, for these too younger or cool to recollect, had the physique of a Pop-Tart and blazed a rainbow-colored path via house).

Adults, myself included, typically affiliate mind rot with Gen Alpha “iPad children” coming of age in a pandemic-scarred, AI-addled, post-meaning panorama. However actually, the mind rot aesthetic has at all times been with us, and was a defining function of the early-2000s web. It’s simply that millennials aren’t in control of mind rot anymore. Our kids are, and all we will do is sit again as they shout “hen banana” in our faces.

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