I Took the Wock to Poland
Lil Yachty's latest viral track is one of the year's most beautiful musical moments.
I am writing this to you from the magical window of time where Lil Yachty’s song “Poland” has gone viral, but has not yet quite reached critical mass. Within 24 hours I’m sure we’ll get articles like, WHY YOU CAN’T REALLY BRING THE WOCK TO POLAND or THE TRY GUYS BRING THE WOCK TO POLAND AND YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT followed soon by the quick descent into internet chum: SEE THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK TO BRINGING THE WOCK TO POLAND THAT DOCTORS DIDN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT. Other things to expect: a folk cover by a white person, a song on Spotify by a no name artist that’s called like “WALK TO POLAND” or “YACHT WOCK” or something equally confusing that will fool someone somewhere into clicking, thinking they’re getting the Yachty version. Get that fraction of a penny where you can! Also, someone is going to get a regrettable tattoo of the Wockhardt logo. But right now? Right now… “Poland” is perfect. A clear throwaway joke song with a half thought out verse wedded to an indelibly beautiful moment where Yachty’s voice—already soft and muffled, like you’re hearing him through gauze—warbles and flutters I TOOK THE WOOOOOCCCCK TO POLLLAANNNNNND.
If you’re already familiar with the song then you’ve probably streamed it on whatever DSP you use, or you’ve interfaced with it on TikTok or in that video where a sim of Yachty is carrying a tray of lean on an endlessly looped death march through a crude digital wonderland, pausing only to belt out the titular line into the flat digital sky.
The beauty of that chorus—can we even really call it a chorus?—is that it’s so melancholy, so disparate from the actual words, that it feels just unfathomably, bottomlessly sad. That it was likely a joke song, or just Yachty and producer F1lthy fucking around in the studio while waiting for someone to get in from Michigan or whatever, it’s that accidental beauty, or the sort of uncanny valley between deep meaning and just some words that sound good with vocal processing effects on them that makes it work. If this was calculated, more thought out, if Yachty was saying anything else then it wouldn’t work. But here? The joke is on us. Is Yachty really going to make me cry while singing about how he brought some cough syrup to Poland? It’s possible! I didn’t cry, but I could have.
Maybe you’re rushing to throw “Poland” onto a playlist now that you can do that, but may I recommend taking a pause and just sitting with the music video as the optimal engagement with this cultural moment?
In the video, Yachty and a couple friends, including a small man with curly hair who smokes and walks very quickly (are we supposed to be familiar with this guy?), wander around in Poland at dusk. The sky is early winter blue, the building quiet. There are no other people around. There’s no narrative to what we’re seeing, and there isn’t supposed to be. This is, to use a music industry term that means nothing, a “visual” in the purest sense of what that term has become. But it works—there’s a level of melancholy there, so that when the camera zooms through the front door of a house and Yachty raps his verse on the steps, there’s some real weight that would not otherwise be there.
There’s an interesting idea bubbling up here: how does a song that isn’t really a song, paired with a video that isn’t really a video, go viral? The easy answer is that the chorus is perfect, but the harder answer is murkier: it’s actually the whole package, the genuinely accidental popularity of the moment came because we, collectively, experienced an unexpectedly beautiful chorus that altered our concept of what we were hearing, and was so towering, so genuine that it transmuted the mood of the “visual” into something loaded with pathos.
Donald Morrison at Passion of the Weiss describes the song as “whimsical,” which is basically correct, but it goes beyond whimsy and into lightning in a bottle territory—where the actual emotion of Yachty’s voice supersedes not just the lyrics, but The Machine’s effort to turn art into viral discourse. (He also links to this excellent Jersey club remix of the song, which is as good as the original)
Over the last couple days, I’ve been thinking about why I think this song is so great, and why I want to put a stamp on it that says I GET IT. Who cares if I get it? Plus, also, maybe I don’t get it! Maybe I’ve missed the point entirely. But listening to “Poland” for the first time, I got that itchy feeling that comes with recognizing something unnameable in a song because you see it in yourself too. Maybe it’s a lyric or a melody or something else entirely, but in that moment of magic it feels like yours and only yours. All you can do in the minutes before it becomes ubiquitous and then, probably, tired and oversaturated, is revel in the weird moment of emotional connection before the world blows it up too big for anyone to feel anything about it.