My Chick Bad

I am a sucker for any song with a bass line that could easily be played by the best parts of a brass band (sorry, trumpets, but we don’t need more than two of you, one to make out with the flutes and the other to actually play your part. Not that we would have flutes in our brass band, but I assume you’d find flutists to make out with no matter where we took you, so I’m anticipating the situation. Really, there is almost no song that can’t be improved by six tubas and twelve trombones. Go ahead. Try to think of a song that can’t be improved by six tubas and twelve trombones. I defy you! It can’t be done. There’s only not more of it because the awesomeness is so… um… awesome that there’s a court order preventing it. You remember, Young Buck v. United States? Sure, yeah, established that only synthetic tubas can be used in hip hop in order to protect America from all that cool. Poor Young Buck, he fell off the face of the earth, didn’t he? You can’t really top rap tubas, though, so it’s understandable. If he’d used trombones, too, American music would have just had to close up shop and go home.).

Anyway, Ludacris. I can’t help it. I have a soft spot for the dude and I’m really loving his new song, “My Chick Bad.” But whatever you do, don’t go for the Trina, Diamond, and Eve remix, which totally undermines the whole best conceit of the song, which is that there is this one badass chick, with swagger, and crazy friends, and a volatile temper that this dude is just crazy for. Once you add in Trina, Diamond, and Eve, then it just becomes a song about a dude who has some chicks he admires.  But in the non-remix, there’s a really delightful hint of awe. I mean, there’s even a nice phrasing of “my chick do stuff that your chick wish she could.” Not “my chick do stuff that you wish your chick could,” but even the chicks who aren’t as awesome as his chick have agency.

I don’t know. Maybe contrasting it with the remix does make it more clear what’s so awesome about this song. Because once it’s about three chicks, it’s actually about the speaker, about how he’s so awesome that he knows three chicks like this.

But in the original, it’s just three and a half minutes devoted to how awesome that girl is, not because of how her existence reflects on him, but just because of how she is. In a way, it reminds me of “Gloria,”  (Heh, I was trying to find a YouTube video of “Gloria” only to discover the terrible world of bizarre The Doors coverbands. Anyway, here’s The Doors.) all passion and unfettered delight. You just so rarely hear songs in which men are unabashedly delighted about a particular woman. But I like it when you do.