On Monday morning, President Barack Obama used the phrase “folks wanna pop off” in reference to criticism of his handling of ISIS following this weekend’s attack on Paris. Many parts of the internet were mightily impressed with the commander in chief’s ability to use current slang in reference to a complex foreign affairs crisis. Very Smart Brothas editor Damon Young, who was particularly impressed, came up with three possible theories as to how “pop off” wound up in the lexicon of “a 54-year-old man who hoops in Sam’s Club Nikes and tucks his shirt into his sweatpants”:
1. He heard of one his daughters using it last week.
2. President Obama has a third unreleased and unshared #POTUSPlaylist that’s composed of nothing but SMACK/URL rap battles, and he listens to it before any press conference where ISIS and Ben Carson’s name might be brought up. And, if it would have lasted five minutes longer, he would have found a way to work “ISIS is gonna get this work” in there too.
3. We’ve kinda suspected it before, but President Obama genuinely gives no fucks at this point. He is fuck devoid. Fuck deficient. Fuck deprived. Fuck destitute. His cupboard of fucks is barren; his tank of fucks has been depleted. You know how, on cloudy nights, you might look up into the vast and endless sky and not find any stars? The same thing would happen if you looked at Obama and searched for fucks. And this, this total absence of fucks, is where pop off came from.
Regardless of how it happened, New York-based DJ and producer JX Cannon grabbed the sample and turned it into what is probably the first-ever Baltimore club-style remix of a Presidential press conference.
Whoever wins the election next year will have a lot to live up to, especially now that the bar has been raised on what we expect in terms of presidential danceability.