Maricopa’s ‘TikTok Rizz Party,’ explained

Brightly colored flyers advertising a “TikTok Rizz Party” have cropped up on the doors of strip mall shops in Maricopa in recent weeks, promising the musical talents of chart-toppers like Ice Spice, Playboi Carti and Ericdoa.

Unless you’re a Gen Z kid or a skinny jean-sporting Millennial dodging the dreaded label of “cringe,” you’re not likely to know what any of that means. But that’s ok, we’ll give you the skinny.

The flyer in question, spotted at places like the Fry’s Marketplace plaza and Maricopa Business Center, advertises a free “TikTok rizz party” featuring 11 pop music artists May 4 on Copper Sky’s soccer field, starting at 7 p.m.

Despite the specifics about location, date and time, the headliners named — Ice Spice and Lil Yachty, for example — call the event’s legitimacy into question. As do the odd mix of sponsors, including Little Caesars, Pepsi and the controversial Chinese e-commerce giant Temu.

Reddit users in the r/Maricopa subreddit debated whether the flyers were real last week, with some expressing concern: “Why would Copper Sky allow this?”

Another more skeptical user took aim at the Wild West Music Fest when he quipped, “There’s no way this is real. Pop stars don’t come to Copper Sky until at least 10 years after their peak.”

Our verdict: It’s almost certainly a hoax.

The city’s community enrichment director Quinn Konold said such a party wasn’t on the books.

“We are aware of the flyers, which appear to be a prank,” Konold wrote. “We have no reservations at our facilities for such an event.”

What’s a ‘rizz party’?

Us olds already have a rough time keeping up with the befuddling Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang — even the older Gen Z folk in the InMaricopa newsroom struggle to keep up with the latest parlance. So, we asked local high schoolers to help interpret.

Kaylin Hansen, a sophomore at Maricopa High School, said “rizz” is an abbreviated form of “charisma,” and is used to refer to someone as charming or smooth.

“If I were to tell my friend, ‘Go rizz her up,’ at a party, it’s a way of saying ‘use your attractiveness and smooth pickup lines to get a girl’s number,” she said.

As for the TikTok Rizz Party? The Maricopa flyers borrow heavily from other, also likely fake “TikTok Rizz Party” flyers shared around Tampa, Fla., late last year. The original flyers quickly gained popularity, inspiring copycat pranks like this one and 175 million TikTok posts mentioning the phrase.

Hansen said while she’s seen the flyer, she hasn’t heard about the party.

“I don’t know anything about that party,” she said. “I’m assuming that it has now become a trend and someone’s trying to promote it and host their own rizz party.”

Even Maricopa City Councilmember Vincent Manfredi chimed in after seeing a photo of the flyer, which included the phrase “rizz not required.”

“How are you going to go to a rizz party with no rizz,” he said. “You need to have some kind of rizz. Even I got a little bit of rizz.”

Vincent Manfredi is an owner of InMaricopa.