If the Baddest B****** Ain’t In LA, Where Are They?

There’s a vision that’s been bouncing around my brain for the past week. In it, a beautiful ballerina dances for an adoring crowd. She has beautiful long pink hair, a different pink from the strand of tulle at the back of her black lace skirt-panty situation. Flanked by dancers in black, she does backbends and leg extensions in front of a barre in a third shade of pink.

None of which is to mention the snapback brandished with her name. Or, behind her, the sans-serif scrawl #$WAGGERINA against a new, fourth pink; and certainly not the Bangerzian warped voice of Theron Thomas speaking of Honda Civics and tooth gems.

This is, of course, the phantom of Adéla’s Lollapalooza performance of new single “Ain’t in LA,” specifically as clipped by PopCrave. The song, which exists at the midpoint of “We Can’t Stop” and Selena Gomez’s “Who Says,” coincides with the announcement of her debut album PRIMA and her most aggressive marketing push to date, briefly taking over my entire algorithm until that gif from the Maddie’s Secret dance class hit the culture.

Now, as a Los Angeles resident (“Angeleno” feels like stolen valor), I should perhaps bristle at the song’s thesis that “the baddest bitches ain’t in LA.” As with most dynamics in this life, Nene Leakes sums it up best — now why am I in it? As someone with functioning eyes, ears, and an active brain, however, I understand where she’s coming from. Particularly when “LA” refers not as much to Los Angeles, the sprawling multicultural community that shoots fireworks in the streets after Dodgers wins, but rather to Hollywood, the parallel society of “come with me to try the new Erewhon smoothie” and pop-up activations and westside straight bars where the most basic people in the world all seem to know a promoter. (Or, alternately, the bars in Silver Lake where, I can confirm, Olivia Rodrigo will not find her future husband.)

Given Adéla’s career trajectory thus far — moving from Slovakia to compete on Dream Academy before an untimely elimination that pushed her into “robbed goddess” territory, followed by a meteoric tear through the corridors of pop power cementing her as a vital rising star — this industry-pilled LA is naturally the city she’s experienced. And she’s absolutely right — the baddest bitches are nowhere to be found in that world.

But all this begs the question: where, then, are the baddest bitches?

The easiest answer, of course, is wherever she’s performing at a given moment. “They’reinChicagotoday!” she shouts arrhythmically in the Lolla video before launching into her bends. A rapidfire catalog of names onscreen offers some options: the baddest bitches are in Zurich, Madrid, Dubai (my eyebrow raised at this one), Doha, Istanbul, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Brussels, Cologne, and Rome. In other words, the baddest bitches? The girls reading this.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the impossibility of this paradigm, as ordained by its superlative nature. If we are talking about the baddest bitches, the obvious truth is that they can’t be in Zurich and Doha and Brussels and Chicagotoday. The bitches in each of these cities may very well be bad, but the English language dictates that they cannot all be the baddest. Besides, all these hypotheses begin to fall apart upon close reading of the primary text.

Our first clue lies in the song’s most distinguishing facet, that unseen Thomas narration ripped straight from 2013. Its incantation, which opens the song, is evocative and specific (with “uh”s omitted for clarity): “back it up, subwoofers in the trunk, and the / gemstones in the teeth going dumb, and the / light the cigarette with the propane / Honda Civic doin’ donuts in the rain.” None of which sounds like São Paulo to this writer’s ear! (A moment for the enjambment, by the way.)

Adéla has cited a photo of her mother at eighteen in front of smuggled pop culture posters as inspiration for the track, which shines through on her first verse — sort of. “Ain’t in LA”’s protagonist, we learn, shares a room with her younger brother, cuts up and restyles secondhand clothes from another family, and has posters of Madonna and Destiny’s Child. …and that’s pretty much it. The prechorus pivots into inspirational pop fodder — “she knows she’s beautiful” — and informs us, somewhat bafflingly, that “she’s taught that her dreams don’t live at home.”

A brief detour, please forgive me, to position this song appropriately. “Ain’t in LA” is, yes, technically the third single from PRIMA, following “Red Bottoms” which I think I listened to once, and our national anthem “KGB.” But between the album announcement, the heavy promotional push, its departure from the hard, impersonal cuntiness of her past singles, and the carefully-orchestrated rollout building to Lolla, it’s functioning effectively as the lead single. This, we’re meant to believe, is who Adéla, the Major Label Pop Star, is.

(For it is impossible, as ever, to disregard commerce and the label entirely — such is the necessary narrative tension of pop stardom.)

So when the girl who famously moved from Slovakia to the States with a clear-eyed drive and hunger for stardom, who last time we heard from her was positioning herself as a Russian spy infiltrating the pop landscape, bemoans the notion of leaving your hometown to follow your dreams, I can’t help but take notice.

But back to the matter at hand — where exactly these bad bitches are. The chorus doesn’t offer us much help, but thankfully the second verse opens with what may be the key to this whole mystery. “All of the girls in them unknown cities,” she sings before more inspirational stuff about being yourself or whatever. But unknown cities — this is a start!

A start that forces the attentive listener to wonder: hey, wait a minute…Zurich and Buenos Aires aren’t unknown cities! Nor is Chicagotoday! In the music video, a sign declares that the baddest bitches are in Bratislava. Personally, I don’t count capitals among unknown cities, but I get it, we’re doing the Lorde “Team” thing, and that’s all well and good. But then you start to consider all these disparate parts — the diva posters, the shared room with a sibling, the Honda Civic doin’ donuts in the rain — and somehow, the baddest bitches feel more elusive than ever.

And so I must return to that most singular idiosyncrasy of the song, that warped incantation serving as its bones. It’s the most specific imagery of the song, conjuring visions of blasting rap in the backseat of your friend’s car while they try and hotbox it with weed they bought off Snapchat. Tooth gems, for some reason, even though you’re all white. In my hometown, there was a grocery store called BI-LO (it has since gone bankrupt). The BI-LO by my house shared a parking lot with a strip mall that had a liquor store and my dad’s favorite Chinese restaurant, as well as an ice cream spot and, most importantly, the Cook Out, which served burgers, milkshakes, and Cajun fries til the wee hours of the morning.

Cook Out inherently implies debauchery, and the parking lot quickly became a hotspot for teenage delinquency; eventually it had its own Snapchat geotag and story, entitled “The Damn BI-LO Parking Lot.”

If I had to guess, “Ain’t in LA” thinks that’s where the baddest bitches are. It sounds crass to write this from the comfort of Los Angeles, having left myself: maybe the baddest bitches aren't the pop stars who leave, and instead the friends who stay behind. It's a melancholic thought, a meditation on the double edged sword forged from chasing a dream, of chasing the light to the nearest cultural center.

If the baddest bitches aren't in LA, then the baddest bitches are girls who will never leave their hometowns. The baddest bitches may not have Madonna and Destiny’s Child posters these days, but Megan Moroney ones, Zara Larsson perhaps.

Maybe the baddest bitches are at the Hilary Duff concert where she brought out Good Charlotte. Or maybe Adéla was right and they were in Chicagotoday, all of them flocking en masse to the set of the next big thing to try and capture a phone video that’ll go viral. After which they get back in their cars and drive home.

Back to the suburbs, where the baddest bitches really are.​