2017 has been a good year for people sticking to the courage of their stupidest convictions. Even if we ignore politics, there’s still the guy who continues to daily endanger his health by eating a picture of Jason Segel, and claiming he’ll continue to do so until Jason Segel eats a picture of him. But paper, at least, is vaguely edible. Vinyl—specifically polyvinyl chloride, or PVC—absolutely is not, which is just part of what makes one redditor’s decision to eat a vinyl record after losing a Kendrick Lamar-based bet such a hideously bad idea.
User “Cousin Tyrone” made his wager based on an elaborate conspiracy theory that claimed Lamar was about to follow his new album, Damn.—released on Good Friday—with a second one on Easter. (You can read about the whole convoluted thought process, involving devil horns, religious symbolism, and a bunch of Matrix allusions—right here.) “Cousin Tyrone” was so convinced by the assertions, that he stated he‘d eat a record of Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City if the prophecized music didn’t arrive. It didn’t. He did.
The resulting video is a snapshot of a particular breed of internet-bred madness, as Tyrone attempts to blend the record down to something vaguely edible when mixed with ice cream. (Its worth noting that PVC, which most modern records are made of, is a noted toxicity boogeyman, although relatively few studies have been done on the effects of eating it, for obvious reasons.) “That’s right, you didn’t get 1,200 karma, my mistake,” he notes at one point, while arguing with the video’s director about his preparations, suggesting the underlying reasons for his self-inflicted ordeal. In any case, he got it down, and then took a bunch of laxatives to make sure it would pass without small sharp shards of plastic tearing him apart.
Tyrone isn’t even the first person to do this, which has to come as a bitter pill to swallow. It does make us hope Lamar drops another album this week, though, if only to send this pioneering effort in pointlessness even further into the asinine frontier.
