What's a Badass?
A 69-year-old who recently found this blog was perplexed by the term “badass,” which unifies all the content.
Must be a generation gap thing. I thought that it was going to be about irresponsible screw-ups and how cool they are but of course it isn’t at all, it is sort of the opposite.
His reaction is totally understandable. I think only 12-35 year-old American or British people understand the term of admiration.
In short, “badass” means “hero.” Young people are too snarky to use such an earnest complement, so they made up a more appropriate one.
Yes, badass is a term of admiration, a high complement. I think it came about after people started using the term “bad” to mean “great.” Caifornians probably added the “ass” on the end, since we tend to add “ass” onto the end of a great many words (dumbass, bitchass).
I have solicited many definitions over the past months, like these:
“Someone who doesn’t care what anyone else thinks of him.”
“Someone who takes risks and bucks convention.”
When I think of a badass, I usually think of the rapper Too $hort. His classic song “Gettin It” pretty well captures my perception of what a badass does:
Get everything you want, get real, get your mail
Get your girl to make bail and get your ass out of jail
You should be gettin it, everything you want
Everything you dreamed of, never have to front
You should be gettin it, gettin money
I’m talking bout you black, don’t laugh it aint funny
Get your kids in school, so they can get an education
Get a degree, and take a vacation
You see I got all my game from the streets of California
Young millionaire with no high school diploma
Livin real good, taking care of my folks
roll up a fat one for the players to smoke
Short Dawg in the house, I know you aint trippin
Cause Life is Too $hort you gotta Get In Where You Fit In
Stop looking for what you never seem to find
It ain’t what you think you got to read between the lines
Cause life ain’t long, for a young black man
Tryin to make money doing all he can
Sellin dope don’t ya hope he would go to class
But the boy makes money and he makes it fast
with the twenties on top and the fifties on the bottom
It’s been a long time since I first got down
But I still keep makin these funky sounds
Get your money man
Get yours
Chorus:
You should be gettin it
Get it while the gettin is good, get it while you can
You should be gettin it
Get it while the gettin is good
I know you tired of being broke just hanging out
You gotta lot a dreams but you can’t get out
The first thing you need to do is set your self some goals
Think positive, everything else is old
And work hard, never stop hustlin
Cause they just love to see the black man strugglin
It’s time to come up, put your dollar bills in the air
He said meet me at the White House and I was there
Cause I’m one in a million, black man rising
They wanna keep me down but I always surprise em
Spend my money in the hood, I know it’s all good
And you should do the same
I lend my brother a hand cause I know I can
I keep going and goin but I’m not the pink bunny
I’m not beatin on a drum I never stop thinkin money
I’m gettin all I can if you don’t ya slip
I can’t wait to get to heaven just to have a grip
When I was broke, I couldn’t afford a meal
But now I’m now rich I can’t be fake I gots to keep it real
It’s been a long time baby since I first got down
But it still keep making these funky sounds
What Too $hort means is that underdogs, those not part of the aristocracy, whatever aristocracy rules their particular world and worldview, whether it be WHITE PEOPLE or THE WEST or THE GOVERNMENT or yesterday’s HEDGE FUNDS or THE POLICE, should just go for what they want anyway, and always advocate for themselves, however they can, with whatever tools are available to them and without concern for laws created by the establishment to keep them down.
A badass is usually facing adversity of some kind, and is almost always:
Unique
Fearless
Resilient
Creative
Self-contained
And often:
Iconoclastic
Stylish
Coveted by the opposite sex
Brutally honest/undiplomatic/uncouth/tactless
In common parlance, here are some ways people might use the term:
“Can you believe John kept playing even after the linebacker broke off his finger? What a badass.”
“Jill gets a lot of action for a 50-year-old. I know! She has at least five boyfriends that I know of, and they keep proposing to her, but she doesn’t like any of them enough. What a badass! I wonder why the hell I married Joel when I think about her situation… I could be living it up in Chile with a lover instead of being a bored housewife in Ithica. I hate snow! The only reason we live here is because of Joel’s tenure.”
“I met this coffee exporter on the airplane to Paris. He was from Burkina Faso, and grew up in the middle of nowhere. But he got sick of being poor and when he was like 14, he bought a suit and hitchhiked to Johannesburg to propose that he start a coffee plantation on his uncle’s land for this huge multinational coffee exporter. He just went to the office and said he had an appointment. They made him wait two days, and he slept in the lobby. Ultimately he convinced the president of the company to hire him, and now, 15 years later, dude lives in Geneva and makes like $150,000 a year as a major exporter. He put all his brothers and sisters through college and then paid for his family to resettle to another country when there was a war near their border in Liberia. Total badass!”
“Greg Mortenson is amazing. He got lost climbing down a mountain and wandered into some poor mountain village in Pakistan where they saved him from freezing to death. Then they told him they wanted him to repay them by building a school for the village. He was like, Okay. And then he built not just a school but a bridge, and then dozens of more schools all over Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was only making $20,000 a year but he didn’t care. What a badass.”
Needless to say, anyone who pulls out his own tooth, stitches up his own bulletwound, walks around the world, starts an orphanage, a revolution, or becomes the first black president of the United States of America qualifies immediately for badass status.
There’s a spiritual quality to being a badass, that thing that keeps a badass going regardless of what horrible conditions they may be living in. Badasses are not co-dependent. They could be surrounded by totally mean disgusting people and still find happiness in their own ways.
