Bad And Boujee

Rain drop, drop top — yes, it is 2017 and we’re repping the Migos.

- Tan Boon Hau

The current biggest rap act in the U.S. right now — called out by fellow Atlantan Donald Glover during his ‘Best Actor’ acceptance speech at the Golden Globes — are the biggest thing right now, in the overlapping part of the venn diagram that intersects contemporary hip-hop and contemporary culture. Riding the very of-the-moment confluence between social media savvy (their top hit spawning the ‘Rain Drop,

Drop Top’ meme wave) and old-school rap bravado alongside a postmodern/current meta consciousness, amidst a strong organic growth and sound instead of posturing and “audience cross pollination” that is every major label rap release. (Incidentally, their album is called ‘Culture’.) (Basically the John Wick of the rap game? In the sense that Wick is an original cinematic creation and not the PG-13 consumer-tested to death, token-Asian-faces for the Asian market superhero tentpoles that are engineered for middle-of-the-road acceptability, avec generic tragedy and blood and sexlessness.) (Yes they have a song called ‘John Wick’.)

But I digress. I just wanted to use their smash hit as the title of this issue’s column. (And yes, you can read into that all the old, and rather said-to-death problems of how censorship and socially-engineered works of art can hurt — or at least diminish and neuter — the power of art.) According to Genius.com, ““Boujee” is an intentional misspelling of “bougie,” which is slang for bourgeois, and refers to the materialism of society’s middle class.” And the bourgeois, which is most of the people you see on social media on the daily (that includes your artist friends) are living in a weird place right now in 2017, Trump Year One.