It was dope to have so many people from so many different backgrounds speaking so many different languages come together to create something that we believed in. I thought I was gonna die on the shoot when I saw the drifting. It was a four day shoot so everyone was on edge the whole time specifically ME when I had to do bluesteel singing to the camera while the cars did doughnuts on the wet road ten feet away. In my mind I was thinking how I was gonna deliver the video to Vice with no legs."
- Writer Maya Arulpragasam describing the shoot for the video to "Bad Girls".[2]
M.I.A. announced via Twitter that she had shot an accompanying music video for the song, directed by Romain Gavras. This is the second time the two have collaborated, following the 2010 video to "Born Free." The video for "Bad Girls" premiered on Noisey, VICE's new music channel on YouTube, on 2 February 2012 at a total length of four minutes and twelve seconds.[2] Filmed in Ouarzazate, Morocco over four days, Margaret Wappler of the Los Angeles Times notes the video is a lady gangsta fantasy but one that plays off very real ingredients from life in the Middle East. There’s crumbled architecture, sustained over years of attack; smouldering oil tankards; young men in kaffiyeh, standing around dangerously bored; mysterious women covered from head to toe, with only their kohl-lined eyes flashing out. M.I.A. deadpans about having sex in cars while vamping in front of those tankard fires. Women are gyrating with AK-47s, while swathed in cheetah patterns, polka dots and gold. And like Ice Cube would (or any young dude feeling futile and angry), there are old family sedans to grab and turn into drifting, racing stunt rides, whether on Crenshaw, Eight Mile or a bullet-scarred road running parallel with an oil pipe line. The video is meant to evoke a Persian Gulf landscape – dusty, baked, semi-apocalpytic and in the hands of M.I.A. and Gavras, "utterly hard-core".[3] The video garnered over two and a half million views in the first two days of its release