What the hell was happening in "Low" by Flo Rida?

Photo courtesy of Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Matthew Roberson | @mroberson22

When making party rap or radio-friendly hip-hop, artists often have the benefit of nonsense on their side. Nobody is expecting to hear "empirical, spiritual, spherical" rhyme schemes from Flo Rida, and the radio also typically doesn't play hip-hop as lyrically dense as that.

What the radio will happily play, however, is a sterile, undeniably goofy song about what women in a night club are wearing. This is how Flo Rida’s “Low” became the inescapable sound of the late 2000s. The track sat at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for ten consecutive weeks, becoming 2008’s longest-running number-one single in the United States. It also went eight times platinum and in 2018, when Billboard celebrated its 60^th anniversary with a list of the 600 biggest songs in the history of its chart, “Low” ranked 28^th, ahead of smashes like “Rolling in the Deep” and “Despacito”. The song did unfathomable numbers and launched Flo Rida into a galaxy of astounding commercial success.

But what was actually going on in this song?

Photo courtesy of Michael Loccisano/FilmMagic

The premise of “Low” sounds simple enough. Flo Rida and T-Pain are having a nice time at the club when, to their great enjoyment, a woman grabs the attention of everyone in attendance and starts dropping that ass. Her outfit, so iconic that it’s the first thing you hear about, famously pairs Apple Bottom jeans and boots with the fur. While perhaps not the most practical thing to wear for a night of ass dropping, furry boots were undoubtedly a hot fashion statement. Apple Bottom jeans, created by Nelly in 2003, were designed to accommodate the type of curvy physique capable of making an entire night club stop and stare. That part makes perfect sense. What isn’t immediately apparent though, at least while listening to Flo Rida and T-Pain narrate the song, is the identity of a mysterious Reebok-wearing woman. 

After first introducing our protagonist (“Shawty had them Apple Bottom jeans, boots with the fur // The whole club was looking at her”), and explaining in great detail how low to the ground she danced (the word “low” is repeated eight times to really drive home the point), T-Pain introduces an entirely different outfit.

Them baggy sweat pants and the Reeboks with the straps (the straps)
She turned around and gave that big booty a smack (a smack)
She hit the floor
Next thing you know
Shawty got low low low low low low low low

While the trademark lowness insinuates that perhaps this is the same shawty from earlier, an entirely new wardrobe raises a few questions. Is this all about the same shawty? If so, she’d have to be changing outfits in the club, which sounds like a logistical nightmare. Where would this costume change have taken place? Was shawty employing her friends for the classic 360 standing huddle, shielding her at all angles from leering onlookers? Does she run to the bathroom to do this, allowing for a grand entrance when she re-emerges in the new fit? With the typical bathroom line situation at a crowded club, plus the annoyance of navigating back through the sea of people to find her friends on the dance floor again, shawty seems unwise to try to pull this off.

Also, where does she keep the second outfit? The sweats are baggy, remember, which means they’d likely take up a fair amount of space in a standard handbag, while putting a pair of Reeboks in there would also weigh it down. Is this an NBA warmup situation, in which shawty rips off the sweats to reveal her game attire – the Apple Bottom Jeans – hiding underneath? That one appears plausible, although if that is the case, the order in which we learn about the outfits seems backwards. It would be one thousand times easier to remove baggy sweatpants that are resting atop jeans than vice versa. You would think any club veteran would understand this. Plus, clunky boots would make the execution of a pant swap nearly impossible in a swarm of sweaty club patrons.

The flip side of this is the possibility that there are two differently dressed shawties vying for Flo Rida’s affection. It’s a classic case of the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie. The common, working class shawty in her blue collar sweats and sneakers, dressed for labor, and the capitalist excess represented by designer jeans and lavish boots of the finest pelt. Most of the song celebrates women’s clothing of all types – though Flo Rida is sure to clarify that he also likes when women get naked, stating plainly “I'mma say that I prefer them no clothes” – so it’s hard to identify which of the clothed women he has his eye on.

Other non-related, but still hilarious questions arise when he mentions that shawty showed off the Apple Bottom jeans “like a pornography poster”. Couple things:

·       This song came out in 2007. The internet was very much around. Why was Flo Rida still consuming poster-based, acoustic pornography? Is he a porn purist?

·       What kind of pornography posters is he working with where the women are wearing jeans? Does he think Apple Bottom ads are porn?

For a man who famously prefers women sans clothes, Flo Rida’s relationship to pornography is adorable and confusing.

Photo courtesy of Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

One more final thing that needs examination is the possibility that this club is a strip club, and Flo Rida is watching two different women dance, one in Apple Bottom jeans, one in baggy sweatpants. Lyrics like “She was worth the money” and “Got her them paper stacks” point to this as a likely explanation. However, it provides no resolution at all for the one woman vs. two women debate. Subtext is so complicated. A simple switch from “she” to “they” in a couple lines would clear things up beautifully, but instead Flo Rida left all pronouns singular and in turn has kept detectives up for years trying to crack this case.

If these are indeed two women and they are both strippers, which I believe to be the most likely scenario, it leaves us wondering what became of the shawties. Things are already hard enough for sex workers as it is, and now they’ve been given a massive platform without any indicated support system from Flo Rida?! Apart from the cursory money tossing – Flo Rida details “breaking off that gwap” after one, again, ONE shawty pops and locks – there is no indication that he expressed romantic interest in either of the women or even asked them about their goals. Do they want to attend grad school? Are they dancing to put food on the table for their kids? Does this club pay them a reasonable wage, given that celebrities like Flo Rida and T-Pain come through to enjoy their work? DID THEY EVEN TIP?

These are the questions that haunt music historians and strippers everywhere. In studying Flo Rida’s anthemic thesis on night club attire and traditional spending habits therein, we find way more questions than answers. In creating a timeless ode to late-night ass activity, Flo Rida forgot to give adequate respect to the pillars of the song: the shawty/shawties who inspired the moment, and how she/they were able to execute these outfits in such a precarious situation.

It is both alarming and irresponsible that the United States government named a state after a man who becomes too distracted by furry boots and Reeboks to properly describe the scene unfolding around him.