Over the weekend, Donald Glover named Migos‘ hit single “Bad and Boujee “the best song ever” during his Golden Globes acceptance speech. America, for the moment at least, seems to agree: it’s now the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. But what is “boujee” exactly? It’s widely known that the abbreviation, spelled “bougie,” comes from the term “bourgeois.” In the contemporary sense of the term, it refers to the manners, affectations, and dress of the upper middle class. While Migos seems to be bragging about the elevated class consciousness of their companions, “boujee” does not usually have a positive meaning.

Saying “that’s bougie” is derisive: it’s used to mock the pretentious consumer habits of an aspirational social climber. For an example of this use of the term, Thought Catalog helpfully provides a list of “32 Things Bougie People Like” including, but not limited to, “Milk products that come from basically anyplace but cows,” Lexus cars, and “anything artisanal.” So how did the bourgeoisie get the reputation for pretension and elevated lifestyles? It goes back to the history of the term and the class it’s associated with.

In French, bourgeois originally just meant a “town dweller.” Similar terms with the same meaning English and German are “burgess” and “bürger.” Sometime around 1100, Europe saw a period of intense urbanization: people left their farms and rather dreary lives as peasants to seek their fortunes in cities. (The bourgeoisie has always been aspirational.) They became merchants and artisans (perhaps the ancient root of the “bougie” taste for the “artisanal”) and were granted special privileges as city dwellers. They were granted certain civic rights and responsibilities that peasants and the aristocracy (barons, dukes, earls, etc.) did not have. They formed a small section of the population and did not have access to the political power of the aristocracy, who owned land and, in some cases, pretty much owned people, too, under the institution of serfdom.

In the course of seven centuries however, this initially modest group of traders and craftsmen became increasingly wealthy and important. They provided the aristocracy with their luxury goods from abroad, their paintings and sculptures, loans to fight their wars and finance their estates, their ships, their silk stockings, and the legal services to help tax their peasants. Gradually, the economic power and cultural importance of the bourgeoisie started to rival the grand Dukes and Counts of the old aristocracy. They were literate and liked to have discussions, and were often invited into the grand salons of their aristocratic betters, who patronized their amusing new ideas.

Around 1700 with the introduction of coffee to Europe and the birth of the coffee house the rate of idea production of the bourgeoisie in France started to really accelerate. (An obsession with coffee is another abiding bourgeois trait.) The conversation began in earnest that maybe an aristocracy and a monarchy were really not such great ideas. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also around that time that the image of the pretentious, vain, socially climbing bourgeois emerged. The title of Moliere’s 1670 comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the bourgeois gentleman, does not connote a polite name for someone of that class. It’s actually supposed to be a pointed joke: only aristocrats could be gentlemen, a “bourgeois gentleman,” someone who sounds totally respectable now, was literally laughable. And so “bourgeois” became “bougie”: the second rate trying very hard to be first rate. But the thoroughly mocked bourgeois gentlemen would get the last laugh.

In 1789, a coalition of dissatisfied Frenchmen, lead by the bourgeoisie and armed with bourgeois ideas about the liberty, equality and fraternity of mankind overthrew the monarchy and the aristocracy’s stranglehold on state power. They would eventually execute the King and a bunch of aristocrats and establish a republic. This naturally “unheroic” class of merchants, bankers, and lawyers would not get to keep their heroic costumes despite being the protagonists of the glorious French revolution. The unseated aristocracy, stripped of political power, still managed to use their cultivated snobbery to make the title of “bourgeois” socially undesirable. Artists and bohemians, who often came from the bourgeoisie, but harbored even grander pretensions than their respectable cousins, came to mock what was “bourgeois” as stodgy and conventional. The main sign of artistic success in the 19th and 20th centuries became the ability to shock the sensibilities of the boring, old bourgeois fart. One could be “bad,” cool, fashionable etc., but never “bad” and “bougie.”

Boring and unglamorous as they were, they still managed to land the role of ambiguous villain in the new Europe. As they consolidated control over industry, and increasingly employed armies of underpaid workers to fuel their commercial empires, the bourgeoisie became the new oppressor in the eyes of many. Karl Marx, writing during another wave of revolutions in 1848, predicted that the need for the bourgeoisie to accrue capital would impoverish everyone else and society would increasingly split into two opposing forces: bourgeoisie, who owned all the capital, and the proletariat, the working class who produced it by their own labor. In Marx’s prophecy, the bourgeoisie was producing its own gravediggers: the workers would rise up against up the bourgeoisie in their own revolution and vanquish them, just as the bourgeoisie had ended the era of Kings and Barons and Dukes. Things turned out to be a little bit more complicated, but as Marxists never tire of pointing out, it’s not over till it’s over.

To bring it up to the present day, “bourgeois” and by extension “bougie” is still not an unambiguously desirable title. It’s a very odd term that’s been applied to the most rapacious oppressors of mankind, who, far from being demonic characters, are simultaneously the most conventional and boring people on earth. It can be applied to great industrialists with the vast riches at their disposal to build the world’s railroads, cars, and social media networks, and equally to people with a bit of disposal income that have performative preference for kombucha. In the Black community, “bougie” has often been applied derisively to those who affect social superiority.

The history of rap lyrics demonstrates a fraught class consciousness when it comes to “bougie.” The earliest lyric we could find in the Genius vault with the term is from Westside Connection’s 1996 “3 Time Felons,” where, not surprisingly, Ice Cube’s attitude is hostile: “I rack my uzi / On bougie niggas that pretend to be friend to me.” By Jay Z’s 1999 “So Ghetto,” the classes have reconciled somewhat but the class struggle still persists:

So I’m cruising in the car with this bougie broad

She said, “Jigga-Man you rich, take the durag off

Hit a U-turn, "Ma I’m dropping you back off”

Front of the club, “Jigga why you do that for?”

Jay is willing to hang with a bougie girl, but cuts it off immediately when she acts stuck up about his appearance. As the 2000s went on and the fortunes of rap grew, it’s maybe not surprising to see the mentions of “bougie” become more frequent. By Kanye and Jay’s 2011 “Niggas in Paris,”, an anthem of triumphantly acquired class status, Kanye raps:

Bougie girl, grab my hand

Fuck that bitch; she don’t wanna dance

Kanye, the self-proclaimed genius, demonstrates the classic artist’s attitude to the bourgeoisie: they are boring. The class struggle has evolved from the out-and out hostility of the gangsta ’90s and given way to snobbery in the 2010s. History so far is following a familiar pattern. But now, with Migos, a new era in the history of the class struggle: simultaneously “bad” and “boujee,” no longer dull and dowdy, but sexy and seductive. Marx might appreciate the irony: the name for the class that sought so many status symbols is now itself a status symbol. So maybe the revolution is around the corner and the Migos are its prophets.