Chicken banana, banana, banana. | Sol de Zuasnabar Brebbia via Getty Images

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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 history of “chicken banana”

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,........

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