Music Video Breakdown: ‘Bad and Boujee’

EDITORS' NOTE: A previous version of this article included an insensitive remark about an individual's name. This remark does not represent The Crimson or its values and has been removed from the article.

From the moment there were younger people to defecate on, humankind has done so with aplomb, as though intergenerational disdain were the strongest laxative. Today, crotchety doomsayers have condemned millennials for their over-reliance on such contrivances as portable telephones, Amazon Now, and PornHub mobile. They fret that this cocktail of information overload and instant gratification has fostered entitlement in millennials and truncated attention spans beyond repair. They obviously have not heard Migos’ “Bad and Boujee,” the sonic equivalent of staring at a beige, textureless wall while seated on a fully mature cactus.

The exceptional success of “Bad and Boujee”—250 million YouTube views and counting, and therefore at least a billion combined minutes of life sacrificed in the name of Migos—proves that humanity has retained the masochistic self-abnegation of Job. Porridge, funneled through a decommissioned sewage pipe into your infected ear, has more charisma than the trap trio responsible for this human rights violation. The porridge makes more sense too: The first two words in this song, purportedly about a bad and boujee woman, are “raindrop” and “drop-top.” Migos sound like they’re trying to verbally approximate an oil spill. A small child combines words more coherently in the middle of a fever dream.

What does it mean to be “bad and boujee,” anyway? Well, “bad” simply means “bad” in the pejorative sense. Thus discontented with his relationship, Offset has resorted to “fuckin’ on your bitch” instead, even though she happens to be “a thot THOT (THOT!)”. The etymology of “boujee,” on the other hand, is a little more complicated: “Boujee” is a clever (?) twist on the word “bougie,” which, as we all know, is French for “candle.” In the parlance of our times, the meaning of “bougie” hinges on the obsolescence of candles, because who in tarnation still uses candles? The answer, as always, is Amish people. And just as the Amish reject the conditions of modernity, the nouveau riche celebrated in “Bad and Boujee” reject many of the trappings of their new lifestyle.

The music video, which offers variations on this theme of old habits surviving newfound wealth, comes courtesy of director Daps. Daps conjures up a bad and boujee world through impressionistic flashes of the high and low juxtaposed. Chanel take-out boxes. Armand de Brignac Gold Brut alongside Cup Noodles and Kentucky Fried Chicken. ATVs. A bad and boujee lady with two iPhones and no clue how to use either. No, seriously: Crouching on a billboard—the sort of location all bad and boujee personages flock to—she takes selfies with the screen facing away from her, apparently unaware of the “flip camera” button. Later on in the video, she finally figures it out in the back of a hotboxed BMW—and proceeds to record a video of her crotch. Anyone aspiring to badness and boujeeness, take note.

Perhaps the best illustration of the video’s thorough (but thematically consistent?) shoddiness is its relationship with Kentucky Fried Chicken. A third of the video is spent inside a KFC, where Offset pours champagne on the floor, Quavo incessantly dabs the iPhone lady’s mouth with a silk handkerchief, and Takeoff, who has spent almost a decade toiling for Migos only to be left off their most iconic song, waves his arms sadly and stiffly in the background, possibly hungry. However, the right reverend Colonel Sanders, himself an outspoken proponent of the bad and the boujee, inexplicably declined to give Migos his blessing. Accordingly, no obvious symbol of KFC appears in the video. You can still tell that they’re eating KFC, though. Because instead of commissioning Chanel fried chicken buckets—which would have been the pinnacle of bad and boujee imagery—Migos just sloppily Sharpied out the Colonel’s face, the word “Kentucky,” and the vertical red stripes on the existing KFC buckets. Yet any viewer whose eyes have not already staged a coup d’etat can clearly see the death mask of the Colonel, his false smile reflected in the glossy black champagne case. Which, of course, means that Migos or whoever decided not to censor the sides of the buckets facing away from the camera. They sustain this sort of laziness throughout “Bad and Boujee,” which probably would have fatally stupefied all of society by now, if not for one thing: Lil Uzi Vert.

Lil Uzi sounds like a pubescent slug who just discovered masturbation. He is therefore a breath of fresh air in this ogre bog of a song. Quite a few listeners insist that they yank their headphones off when Lil Uzi comes on. Don’t listen to them: Their preferred genre of music is probably a Gregorian chant through a yogurt-clogged baby monitor. Sporting a Marilyn Manson t-shirt and whipping his tiny tie-dye dreads back and forth, Lil Uzi slams a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the whole affair. After all, his costars Offset and Quavo both look like they’re dreading post-shoot prostate exams conducted by their respective ex-wives. When Lil Uzi first appears, presaged by his coital squawks, he prolongs a poorly executed dab for so long that it looks like he’s just making out with his elbow. His opening line is “YEAH, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH (YEAH),” delivered with an embarrassed smile that refreshingly seems to say, “You actually take me seriously as an artist?” Concluding a thoroughly unmemorable verse—replete with lines like, “And you know we winnin’! Yeah, we is not losin’!”—he looks into the camera and shrugs good-naturedly.

For discerning listeners who want to enjoy “Bad and Boujee” but actually respect themselves, there is an edit of the song which scraps all the verses in favor of Lil Uzi squalling “YEAH, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH” for five minutes straight. The rest of us, unfortunately, must follow Lil Uzi’s lead, looking into the camera and shrugging as we consent to the collective lobotomy that is “Bad and Boujee.” Whether we are bored or boring, our elevation of this mediocre song to the level of international phenomenon proves that we deserve to be submerged in the dung of our elders. Therefore blow, asses, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! Spout till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks! We will be the pattern of all patience.

—Staff writer Jonathan P. Trang can be reached at jonathan.trang@thecrimson.com.

For more Arts Blog coverage, click here.

For more Crimson Arts content, click here.

By Courtesy of YouTube