Balegdah

About

Balegdah refers to a viral video in which singer Jesy Nelson of the British pop group Little Mix attempted an impression of a Jamaican accent. Due to the bizarre sound and humorous facial expressions made while performing the impression, the video was widely circulated through Tumblr, YouTube and Vine, where it was often spoofed through remixes and image macros.

Origin

In March 2014, a video of the United Kingdom-based pop group Little Mix attempting various accents as part of a "You Generation" promotion was uploaded to YouTube, in which singer Jesy Nelson attempts to perform a Jamaican accent by blurting out a strange noise. While the original video was subsequently removed, it has been reuploaded several times (shown below).

Spread

On March 11th, 2014, YouTuber Geoff Miller uploaded a slowed down version of the video, which gathered upwards of 1.4 million views and 520 comments over the next four years (shown below, left). On March 30th, YouTuber VicariousPotato uploaded a content aware scaling version of the video (shown below, right ).

On May 2nd, YouTuber Fabibaby100 uploaded a music remix of the video (shown below, left). On December 17th, YouTuber Paul Imm uploaded a remix of the video titled "Balegdah Extreme" (shown below, right). Meanwhile, several news sites published articles about the video, including The Huffington Post^[1], Digital Spy^[2] and Daily Star^[3].

Jesy Nelson's Response

On October 15th, 2015, BuzzFeed^[4] published an article where they asked Little Mix to Explain Jesy's accent; she explained "All of us do the same thing, when we're like stuck on how to do something we go (Jesy makes indecipherable noises). So I was stuck on how to do it and then I was like, did my Jamaican accent, but someone cut off my Jamaican accent!"^[4]

Search Interest

External References