(G)I-DLE’s Yuqi Goes Viral For “Wildly” Misusing AAVE

Many of the lyrics do not make sense, according to AAVE.

(G)I-DLE’s Yuqi recently went viral for all the wrong reasons.

240711-G-I-DLE-Yuqi-Klaxon-at-M-Countdown-documents-1
(G)I-DLE’s Yuqi | Mnet

Earlier this year, Yuqi made her Korean solo debut with the mini album Yuq1.

YUQI-1st-Mini-Album-YUQ1-Concept-Photos-documents-4
| CUBE Entertainment

The album’s lead track gained attention for its risqué lyrics and paid homage to classic horror characters like Ghostface.

In addition to this track, Yuqi also released a special performance video for the track “On Clap (feat. Lexie Liu).” The video features the idol dancing to the hip-hop track with backup dancers.

It is a clip from this video that has since gone viral but has mainly received criticism.

Currently sitting at 2.7 million views on one tweet, the video portion features the song’s lyrics on the screen.

The criticism is based around the song using AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), incorrectly through out.

Lines like “this beat on slap” and “bad boogie babies on tap” do not make sense when following the rules of AAVE. As a whole, many felt that the entirety of this video did not make sense, also calling out the songs’ writers.

Misusage of AAVE can be considered offensive (usage in general can be considered cultural appropriation), as the language, like others, is a part of the culture and has its own rules that must be followed.

For example, “The beat on clap,” seems to be a mixture of two commonly used phrases. It seems to use clap in place of slap, which is usually used to describe something as “good” i.e. “This song slaps.” When saying that something is “on something,” usually it is used with an adjective to describe the first word. For example, “Waist on skinny” is a way of describing a thin waist.

Netizens have discussed this song and others using AAVE incorrectly, calling for the practice to stop.

(G)I-DLE

Scroll to top