Kai Cenat, Twitch, and ‘Rizz’: How the Rap Internet Ruled 2023
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What language do teenagers speak? Parents, as always, seem to be at a loss. Last month, The New York Times published a helpful guide to the slang terms growing in popularity online. Words like “sigma” (a stoic guy), “gyat” (a nice butt), and “rizz,” (basically “charisma”) topped the list, and most of the words seemed to emerge from platforms like Twitch and TikTok — terms like “rizz,” which the Oxford English Dictionary named Word of the Year. “Rizz is a term that has boomed on social media,” Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl said in a press release earlier this week, “and speaks to how language that enjoys intense popularity and currency within particular social communities — and even in some cases lose their popularity and become passé — can bleed into the mainstream.”
Rizz — perhaps both the concept and the word itself — so eluded adults this year that The Wall Street Journal, in August, published an explainer on the phrase in which one person described it as “the dumbest thing I ever heard.” That same month, Kai Cenat, the 21-year-old Twitch streamer largely responsible for the linguistic amalgam’s contagion among young people around the world, caused a small riot in Manhattan after promising to give away gift cards and video game consoles in Union Square during one of his streams. The chaos took the city completely off guard, as the crowd size swelled into the thousands within minutes. New York Mayor Eric Adams, echoing befuddled parents everywhere, declared, “Our children cannot get their values, their beliefs from social media and other outside entities.”
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The collective confusion over terms like “rizz” and “gyat” (both popularized by Cenat), as well as over the near messianic power of certain online creators, speaks to shifting dynamics online, as so-called Gen Alpha, born after 2010 and native to a brain-rotting degree of internet irony, charts new social and lexicological terrain. The mass confusion extends beyond parents trying to decipher the hook to the latest TikTok earworm — “sticking out your gyat for the rizzler/you’re so skibidi, you’re so Fanum tax” — and is beginning to creep into the broader pop cultural landscape, like how Livvy rizzed up Baby Gronk.
The hip-hop world, where streamers such as Cenat and Adin Ross have developed real influence, might offer the clearest view of what kinds of changes are on the horizon. Despite the genre’s subdued chart performance this year, rap remained at the nucleus of online culture, driving the zeitgeist among young streamers increasingly becoming the dominant voices in popular culture. This year especially, snippets from live streams — often accompanied by split-screen footage from games including Fortnite and GTA V — flooded social feeds like the revelrous teens who overran Union Square, so much so that appearing on popular live streams is, by now, a part of many rappers’ press runs. Cenat, for example, has had everyone from Ice Spice to Lil Yachty and Nicki Minaj join him on his stream. If the past year is any indication, the trend is only just getting started.
The music video for one of the year’s biggest songs, Lil Uzi Vert’s Jersey club-infused anthem “Just Wanna Rock,” caused a similar public disturbance in New York on the count of Cenat announcing a call for background dancers for the video shoot on social media. Speaking to Complex, Cenat recalls Uzi asking him to post the shoot’s location to draw a crowd of extras. The streamer, who grew up in the Bronx, said he was surprised since he’d expect a celebrity like Uzi to carry more weight. Nevertheless, a 1 a.m. post from Cenat was all it took for the scene to erupt into the frenetic SoHo crowd dance-off that made the video’s final cut. In September, Kai hosted a 24-hour stream with Offset, during which the pair goofed around like teenage stoners. The stream was less than a year after the death of Migos member Takeoff, and after it ended, Offset sent Kai a message on Twitter saying, “I haven’t had fun like this in life in a long time bro I needed that in my life.”
Rap music has long been at the center of much of online culture, and now some of the biggest names in the genre have started to take notice of the influence wielded by this new generation of streamers. On Drake’s J. Cole-assisted “First Person Shooter,” from his October release For All the Dogs, he raps, “You niggas is still takin’ pictures on a Gulfstream/My youngins richer than you rappers and they all stream.” Lil Yachty commented in an October vlog with Cool Kicks that “Kai for sure got more money than, I think, 90 percent of rappers … Adin too, sure!” This isn’t necessarily a positive. Streamers have helped usher in a decidedly more juvenile culture online. Indeed, it’s why the internet lately feels kind of like a teenage boy’s bedroom, often the backdrop for viral clips from Twitch streamers — like it hasn’t had a shower in months, and there seems to be porn just about everywhere.
Cenat himself is not without controversy. In January, a woman alleged she had been assaulted at a party hosted by Cenat. (“As soon as this was brought to my attention, I didn’t go nowhere but the police,” he later told fans on his stream.) In November, he went on a weeklong livestream from what appeared to be a prison, drawing ire from basically anyone older than 25, who saw the gambit as perpetuating Black stereotypes. Ross, for his part, is known to cavort with misogynistic creators like Andrew Tate and has expressed countless right-leaning views on his stream, in addition to dropping the N-word a few times.
Still, misguided as some of the content might be, it’s undoubtedly become the baseline for young people online, most notably young hip-hop fans — members of Gen Alpha. This might explain why so much energy was spent in 2023 attempting to diagnose what, if anything, had changed about rap music in recent years. The genre’s chart dominance has indeed stumbled and rap stars young and old bemoaned an unfamiliar landscape. They might take some consolation in knowing that soon, it won’t be just rap. It’s a rizz-y world, and we’re all just living in it.
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