Why your kid is yelling “chicken banana”

My husband was picking up our older kid from school a few weeks back when he overheard a teacher issuing an exasperated directive to her class:

“No more chickens! No more chicken banana!”

Though it might sound absurd to the untrained ear, my husband knew exactly what she meant, because the words “chicken banana” have been reverberating through our apartment for months.

It’s not just us. When Gabe Dannenbring, a teacher and content creator in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, asked his seventh-grade students about the phrase recently, “Every single one of them harmonized ‘chicken banana’ at the exact same time,” he told me.

“Just last week, I was walking around a mall here in Los Angeles, and a small kid was hopping around and singing it to himself,” said BJ Colangelo, a media theorist and analyst, in an email.

“Chicken banana” hasn’t quite reached the ubiquity of “6-7,” the Gen Alpha catchphrase that has made it all the way to 10 Downing Street. But I wanted to write about it because it’s in the middle of what’s becoming a common trajectory, from novelty song to TikTok trend to all-purpose adult-tormenting meme. The rise of chicken banana shows how social media influences culture even among kids too young to have social media. It reveals the growing overlap between AI-generated content and wholly human silliness. And it’s a reminder that if kid culture seems absurd — well, it’s supposed to.

The juxtaposition of “chicken” with “banana” calls to mind AI-generated brain rot icons like Ballerina Cappuccina, a smiling coffee cup with a dancing human body. One of Dannenbring’s students even described it as “like AI slop but for words,” the teacher told me.

But in fact, the catchphrase stems from a techno-inflected earworm of the same name, released last February by a Swedish (and human) production team working under the name Crazy Music Channel.

“It just came up in one of our talks,” Michel Petré, CEO of the label MTM Music AB, told me. “You know, let’s just put the chicken and banana together.”

A video released at the same time features a chicken head on a banana body, a chicken pizza with banana slices spinning on a turntable, and — why not? — an alien hand dialing a phone.

“With all the bad things happening all over the world,” Petré said, “we wanted to do something funny that people could laugh at.”

The song soon inspired a global dance trend on TikTok and Instagram, with everyone from 60-something Englishwomen to Bollywood stars joining in. Like so many social media fads, it might have ended there — “I tried to just wave my hand at it as one of those flash-in-the-pan trends,” Colangelo said.

Instead, “chicken banana” spread out from TikTok and down the age ladder. One New York City fourth-grader became familiar with the phrase because “the boys kept saying it” at her school, she told me. She’s never seen a TikTok featuring the song, but today she will utter the phrase “if I’m excited, or if I hear somebody say ‘chicken banana,’ or if I just want to,” she said.

Like “6-7” or “skibidi,” “chicken banana” doesn’t really have a meaning, but it can be used to express a variety of emotional states. “I heard someone say it in a really sad voice, like, Aww, chicken banana,” Dannenbring said.

Explaining the term’s appeal is almost as hard as defining it. “It’s just funny,” the fourth-grader said. “Chicken and banana are, like, two totally different things.”

“Chicken Banana” is far from the first novelty song to become a hit with kids. Petré pointed to “Baby Shark,” the 2010s song-and-dance phenomenon that dominates day care playlists to this day (here I must recommend “Wedding in the Sea,” the spinoff in which Grandpa Shark renews his vows with his “old shark bride”).

Nor is it unusual for a single phrase to come loose from its context and enter kids’ cultural lexicon. Kids in the 2000s loved yelling “WASSUP” even if they’d never seen a Budweiser commercial, Colangelo points out.

Now, however, the pathway from source material to classroom chaos is faster and more efficient. Before social media, “if your friends or family didn’t think something was funny, you’d probably stop repeating it faster because you didn’t have anyone who shared that sense of humor,” Colangelo said. “Now, you can look at a phone and see thousands, if not millions, of people across the globe who do find it funny enough to repeat ad nauseam, which then validates your own sense of humor.”

Dannenbring worries that the speed and ubiquity of social media trends can put pressure on kids to jump on or be left behind. A lot of kids may not know what phrases like “chicken banana” mean, he said (if they mean anything at all): “They just say it because they know it’s in their world. It’s what it takes to be cool now.”

But there’s also a more joyful, anarchic side to “chicken banana.” It’s silly, it’s bizarre, and yelling it out in class allows kids — not adults — to control the narrative for a minute, even if that narrative begins and ends with a barnyard animal teaming up with a fruit to make techno music.

“Chicken banana” is a spiritual sibling of “chicken jockey,” the niche Minecraft character whose appearance in the recent movie became young people’s cue to cause mayhem. That movie succeeded, Colangelo told me at the time, because it was truly made for Gen Alpha kids, not for grownups — and screaming and throwing things when the chicken jockey appeared was one way those kids made the viewing experience their own.

“Children are a marginalized demographic and are denied autonomy in so many aspects of their lives, in favor of what their parents want for them,” Colangelo said this week. “As children come into their own personalities, they become desperate for anything that feels ‘theirs.’”

If adults are befuddled or even mad, that’s part of the point. “Their goal is, honestly, just to confuse older people, and they wear that as a badge of honor,” Dannenbring said. “It’s like their own language.”

No one I spoke with for this story could predict with any confidence what the next chicken-banana-style trend would be. “A year ago, if you would have said ‘chicken banana’ would be the trend — like, what?” Dannenbring laughed. “It’s like a mad lib.”

Crazy Music Channel, however, is hoping to catch lightning in a bottle a second time with “Techno Duck,” released just last week. The accompanying video is even more absurd than “Chicken Banana,” featuring a fish playing a sax solo and a camel floating on a cloud. The clip also includes a notable image: two cat heads flanking a keyboard, which sails through a background of stars and galaxies.

The lip-synching felines recall Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat, two iconic millennial memes known and prized for their absurdity (Nyan Cat, for those too young or cool to remember, had the body of a Pop-Tart and blazed a rainbow-colored trail through space).

Adults, myself included, often associate brain rot with Gen Alpha “iPad kids” coming of age in a pandemic-scarred, AI-addled, post-meaning landscape. But in fact, the brain rot aesthetic has always been with us, and was a defining feature of the early-2000s internet. It’s just that millennials aren’t in charge of brain rot anymore. Our children are, and all we can do is sit back as they shout “chicken banana” in our faces.

Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old boy detained by immigration authorities last month in Minneapolis, has been released with his father (for now). But the Trump administration is sending an increasing number of children to immigration detention, where some detainees say they’re being held without proper medical care.

It’s looking like another very bad year for pediatric flu cases, and experts say declining rates of flu vaccination are likely driving the spike.

Cursive is making a comeback, with about two dozen states adding the fancy writing to their curricula in recent years.

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