“It’s all a lie, the baddest b****** ain’t in LA.”
The line comes from “Ain’t in LA”, a viral 2026 song by Slovak artist Adéla Jergová, from her debut album, PRIMA. The inspiration behind this song is from her mother who grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. She shared a room with three younger siblings and had her walls transformed into a shrine of western pop culture. Because Western content was strictly banned under the regime, she would have her father, who worked in the German mines, to smuggle music and posters across the border. Adéla recalls gawking at posters of Madonna and Destiny's Child in her grandmother's bathroom put up by her mother years prior. Reflecting on this generational mirror, she notes that she is her mother and her mother is her, only, Adéla was born into a world where she is significantly more fortunate and free. To the singer, her mother, whose dreams were confined by the borders of Bratislava, remains the ultimate and original baddest ***** on earth.
That generational sense of geographical limitation is exactly what Adéla’s music seeks to dismantle. The song is about how the most artistic and talented people are not always from Hollywood or New York City. Maybe they are in Bratislava or some unknown city you have probably never heard of before. It is an anthem for young women from all parts of the world to never give up on their dreams. However, the idea behind the song can be interpreted in a much more unique way. Its central statement challenges a deeply established assumption within the global entertainment industry. It attacks the popular belief that America is the absolute center where true success must happen.
For decades, the United States stood as the undisputed center of international pop culture. It drove a landscape where mainstream success was dictated almost entirely by American media and American standards. However, with the rise of digital platforms and social media, these traditional beliefs are slowly being dismantled. This shift has empowered non-Western cultural powerhouses to capture worldwide audiences strictly on their own terms. We can see this clearly with the explosion of K-pop, anime, afrobeats, and other regional cultures. This evolution marks a decisive shift towards a world with multiple cultural centers. It proves that international recognition no longer requires an artist to move to LA or abandon their local identity. Instead, success thrives in a decentralized world where global influence can originate from any corner of the globe.
To properly understand this massive transformation, we need to distinguish the difference between Americanization and Americentrism. Americanization simply describes the spread of American culture, style, products, and media to the world. Americentrism, on the other hand, operates on a much deeper level of how we think. It represents the built in assumption that the United States is the natural center of international cultural production. Historically, this way of thinking forced an unequal dynamic between the center of the world and everybody else. Within this older system, non-American artists were required to undergo a process of assimilation to cross over into the mainstream. This often meant they had to adopt American fashion trends, sign with major Hollywood labels, or physically move to American metropolitan areas just to achieve international validation.
This rigid requirement created an unfair hierarchy of cultural legitimacy. Domestic or regional success outside the West was looked at as subordinate until it was finally approved by the American market. Within this older framework, Los Angeles functioned as more than just a geographic city. It acted as a primary site that produced our ideas of success. Hollywood embodies the ultimate premise of “the American Dream”. It promotes a myth that global prestige is universally accessible through pure talent and hard work, but only if one assimilates into American standards. The main flaw of this old paradigm is not that Hollywood exists as a production hub. The problem is that Hollywood historically monopolized global art’s legitimacy. This monopoly changed the idea of globalization with a one way migration toward America.
The historical dominance of the United States entertainment was supported by a massive concentration of money and infrastructure. Hollywood developed as a complex ecosystem made up of major film studios, broadcast networks, talent agencies, publicity firms, media platforms, and international distribution networks. This infrastructure was mirrored and reinforced on the east coast by New York City. New York anchored the institutional architecture of publishing, advertising, financial capital, fashion, and the recording studios. Together, the Los Angeles and New York axis formed a powerful cultural map that generated significant geographical inequality. While creative talent naturally emerges across all regions of the world, the facilities required to package, fund, and distribute that talent globally remains locked inside these key American hubs.
As a result, media globalization in the twentieth century operated with a profound structural imbalance. The United States is exceptionally good at creating the tools needed to transform localized creativity into universally recognized cultural exports. This concentration of power established a system of cultural dependency. Regional artists faced heavy systemic pressure to migrate to Western hubs. This reinforced a model where global authority was strictly tied to specific locations. Metropolitan centers in developing or just non-Western nations frequently functioned as important centers of national culture, like Jakarta in Indonesia and Bangkok in Thailand, yet they remained structurally pushed to the sidelines compared to the primary global hubs in California and New York.
Nowadays, the media increasingly recognizes a decisive break from this old model of imperialism. Rather than a singular Western center exporting cultural products outward to the rest of the world, contemporary global cultural flows are multi-directional, more target audience-based, and driven by fandom based networks. The global ascent of non-Western media demonstrates that audiences all over the world regularly engage with entertainment produced outside of Western studios and languages. This transition signals a major shift from cultural monopolisation, where everything starts to look the same, now to structured multipolarity, where many different centers hold power. Contemporary pop culture operates under dynamic conditions where international artists no longer need to erase their regional identities to achieve massive global reach.
The main reason for this structural transformation is the rapid rise of technology. Specifically, modern technology has changed the rules of cultural distribution. Historically, cultural industries required immense physical distributors, which naturally created the dominance of certain traditional industry hubs. Now, digital platforms, streaming services, and social media algorithms have systematically removed these issues. Digital platforms allow cultural content produced in any region to circulate directly to global audiences. According to research, online platforms have shifted the dominant pipeline. The power belongs to the algorithmic distribution networks. Traditional physical media hubs are no longer the main key needed for international visibility.
However, technology alone does not fully explain this massive structural shift. This change operates alongside the rise of highly organized and popular internet sub-culture, fan communities. Popular media audiences are no longer passive consumers who just watch what they want. Fandoms are decentralized cultural communities that operate entirely independent of corporations. They can do marketing campaigns on a global scale, organize digital streaming initiatives, and circulate content across international borders without any help from traditional promotional systems. A fan in Jakarta can help popularize a Korean pop group across Latin America, while European audiences can discover East Asian or South American media without any influence from the American market. As a result, cultural legitimacy is now generated from fans to fans network mobilization rather than top down approval from elite institutions.
These cultural shifts carry major political implications for international relations, particularly regarding the distribution of soft power. Soft power is the capacity to shape the preferences of international actors through attraction rather than coercion or force. For much of the era following the Second World War, American soft power was deeply linked to its cultural exports. These exports projected idealized narratives of democratic mobility, economic prosperity, and a modern lifestyle. As international artists achieve worldwide prominence without assimilating into American media systems, the monopoly of United States soft power will be weakened. This shift is happening at the same time as internal political fragmentation within Western nations and rising debates over national identity, migration, and border regulation. While American soft power remains powerful, it now operates within a highly competitive environment characterized by competing non-Western soft power projections.
Cultural media exports serve as a powerful tool for geopolitical attraction and national branding. For example, South Korea's entertainment industry in the 2020’s has made the Korean language, fashion, and social norms more globally known. Similarly, Japanese anime and Latin American music expand the political and economic influence of their respective regions by projecting distinct cultural identities onto the global stage. The global trajectory of artists like Lisa of Blackpink demonstrates how individual celebrities leverage localized authenticity within their global brand architectures. Rather than minimizing her Thai heritage to fit a Western mold, she proudly incorporates local visual iconography, Bangkok locations, and regional fashion into her globally received work.
Similarly, Adéla’s visual presentation in “Ain’t in LA” is a perfect example of this modern dynamic. By having traditional Slovak attire and hometown backdrops within a modern pop context, she asserts regional authenticity as a primary marker of distinction. Regional identity is no longer subordinated to Western aesthetic norms. Instead, it is applied strategically to command global prestige. Despite said major changes, it would be entirely inaccurate to claim that LA has become irrelevant. Hollywood remains a major entertainment center, American media maintains an enormous global influence, and the United States continues to possess such unsubscribable soft power. What has changed is not the existence of that power, but the structure surrounding it.
The world increasingly contains several cultural centers capable of producing globally influential entertainment. Seoul can function as a center of global pop culture. Tokyo can operate as a major center of animation and visual storytelling. Singapore, São Paulo, Lagos, Paris, and countless other cities increasingly participate in global cultural production. The geographical imagination of success has therefore changed in a profound way. An artist doesn't necessarily need to move to LA to become relevant. This is precisely why Adéla's story provides such an effective cultural metaphor for our time. The implication is not that artists should never move. The true implication is that they should not have to move in order to be considered global.
The most important implication of “Ain’t in LA” is not simply that Los Angeles is no longer the only place where pop stars can emerge. More fundamentally, it is that the cultural hierarchy that once placed the United States at the center of global entertainment is slowly beginning to break down. All this time, talent existed everywhere, but recognition was disproportionately filtered through American institutions, markets, and cultural standards. To become truly global often meant becoming visible to America first. This assumption is getting more difficult to sustain. With the rise of social media, streaming platforms, and better local industries, the flow of cultural influence has fundamentally decentralized, eliminating the need for artists to relocate to Western hubs like LA to achieve worldwide audiences. Today, culture can originate from anywhere, and an artist's distinct local identity is exactly what captures global audience's attention. Beyond entertainment, this transformation represents a significant realignment of soft power in international relations. With cultural influence no longer monopolized by a single dominant center, nations, industries, and artists everywhere can now actively participate in crafting the narratives that could blow up globally. As a result, regional culture has evolved from a passive export into a dynamic tool that societies use to actively shape the world’s perception of them.
This is why “Ain’t in LA” is more than just a viral song. Its central message captures a larger structural change in globalization. Global relevance is becoming detached from American geography. The old cultural map placed Los Angeles at the center and treated everywhere else as a potential source of talent waiting to be discovered, developed, or validated. The emerging map looks very different. It has Makassar, Osaka, Hanoi, San Juan, Mumbai, and countless other places producing culture that travels globally on its own terms.
Los Angeles is not disappearing. Hollywood is not disappearing. American culture is not disappearing. Americentrism, however, is dying. What is disappearing is the belief that America must sit at the center of every global cultural conversation, or that the rest of the world must pass through America before it can matter. The world is not becoming less global, but, more culturally diverse, more decentralized, and increasingly multipolar.
The baddest artists were never all in LA.
We just spent too long looking there first.
The baddest b****** are all over the world.
References
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D'Orso, M. I. (2026, September 8). In 2026, we like pop stars a little more when they're not American. Nss Magazine. nssmag.com/en/lifestyle/46733/pop-star-2026-bad-bunny-lisa-katseye-american-soft-power
ELLE India. (2026, August 28). Why Adéla’s “Ain’t In L.A.” means more than its viral moment for women across the globe. https://elle.in/life-culture/opinion/why-adela-aint-in-la-means-more-than-its-viral-moment-for-women-across-the-globe-12445816
Frey, T. (2025, May 29). The disappearance of pop culture. Futurist Speaker. https://futuristspeaker.com/social-trends/the-disappearance-of-pop-culture/
Lomax, T. (2026, August 17). If the baddest b***** ain’t in LA, where are they? PAPER. https://www.papermag.com/adela-aint-in-la-essay
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