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Music

Lil Yachty Playing a Bar Mitzvah Is a Timeless Chasm of Teen-ness

Awkward button downs and epic mosh. This. Is. Adolescence.
Lauren O'Neill
London, GB

In many ways, it makes total sense that Lil Yachty would play at a Bar Mitzvah: he is, after all, the self-styled King of the Teens, and made an entire album about being a teenager. A Bar Mitzvah, that specifically teenage rite-of-passage, seems like a place where he would be extremely at home.

Lil Yachty, who appears to have played a Bar Mitzvah at the weekend (the internet has not yet managed to track down info on when or where, which is perhaps better: this Bar Mitzvah exists independent of place and time, it is simply a tween nirvana, defined only by the forces of turn up, energy drinks, and button downs – more on this later), appears to agree:

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Let's just break down all the reasons why this rules for a second:

The crowd

This is the greatest crowd I have ever seen. Is there anything more gloriously awkward than teens in formalwear? Is there anything more gloriously awkward than teens in formalwear letting loose to a rap show at a Bar Mitzvah? This is art, they are art.

(Related: the moshpit

Moshpits are also a teen rite of passage whatever genre of music you like and I am glad to see that even here, at this Bar Mitzvah, the teen impulse to jump into one another so hard you're on the brink of injury is still alive and well, ruined suit jacket be damned. "Sorry Linda just got carried away in the mosh," these teens later say to their respective mothers who are bemoaning their scuffed shoes. "That's just how I live now." The teens lower the sunglasses that they are all wearing, and turn out of the room, away up to their bedrooms, shutting the doors behind them. Their mothers are distraught; they know their innocent children have been lost forever, corrupted, propelled into adulthood's rage by the physical awakening provided them by the mosh.)

Yachty, himself

What's great about what Lil Yachty is doing here is that he doesn't care that it's a Bar Mitzvah (thus potentially "uncool") or that he's performing for kids, because these are his people and he wants to show them a good time. If that means roaring "TURN UP TURN UP TURN UP TURN UP" (0:49) at a room of extremely hype teens before spraying them with bottled water in a frenzy, then so be it.

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The two little kids at the front

0:42, thank me later.

The absence of time or place

For all that exists is this Bar Mitzvah. This video is timeless, this Bar Mitzvah is timeless, teens looking like tiny, fake adults in too-long ties is timeless. The ungainliness and abandon with which they mosh is timeless. The tiny kids being pushed to the front, probably left in the care of an older cousin or sibling by their parents and then completely abandoned within 0.01 seconds of Yachty appearing is the bread and butter of how teens behave at family occasions. And though Yachty is a very millennial rapper, the emotions he elicits have been tornado-ing their way around teen bodies forever. This Bar Mitzvah – we don't know where, we only sort of know when – proves it.

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