SEATTLE — Seattle’s own Sir Mix-A-Lot released the now iconic song “Baby Got Back” nearly 25 years ago. The song was released May 7, 1992.
“I was in a hotel room and the Super Bowl was on and back in that era you had the Spuds MacKenzie girls who, basically, they were shaped like stop signs, just a rail with a head,” Sir Mix-A-Lot remembers. “It just seemed like, in that era, there was no multicultural beauty. If you were a beautiful, black woman you had to assimilate to white culture. So the only black women you saw on TV, other than Clair Huxtable, they played maids, usually heavyset, and they offered great advice; prostitutes. And I got sick of it.”
“I wanted to talk about the African American idea of what beauty was,” he said. “So I was like, ‘how do I do that without coming off serious?’ Because if you come off too serious you turn people off. Keep in mind, in that era, what I was wanting to say was not cool. I mean, I was watching Eddie Murphy doing movies, dissing black girls’ bodies: ‘You don’t want gluteus maximus, you want gluteus minimus!’ Remember that? I was like, they got a black dude to say that? We like the hour glass shape! I decided to write it and make it kind of tongue and cheek and eventually people would get it if it hit, but I never thought it would hit.”
When Baby Got Back got banned
In 1992, “Baby Got Back” was risque, which is hard to imagine now, since music videos went crass many years ago. The song was actually banned from MTV.
“It was the most requested video then,” Sir Mix-A-Lot remembers. “It was number one when they decided to ban it. Which I thought was a bad thing, but it ended up being a great thing. I almost stared crying! ‘No! My career is over!’ That’s what I thought. Then my publicist called me. She said, ‘Mix, don’t worry about this. This is great. Think of it like this: you are Elvis Presley and you just shook your leg too many times on the Ed Sullivan Show.’
“One thing I noticed, because I’m a big music history buff, any time an artist offends the norm, those people who are kids then love them forever,” he said. “Ask the Rolling Stones, ask the Beatles, ask Jimi Hendrix. I’m not saying I’m in their class, but it definitely gave the song legs that it wouldn’t have had.”
The song was clearly offensive to some. But to many curvaceous women, it was a long overdue anthem.
“The people who accused me of creating a sexist song and were telling me, ‘This is not what women wanted to hear,’ were men,” he said. “The men in the establishment. So, men at MTV, men at radio stations. Women — white, black — that’s what blew my mind. Every woman was like, ‘About time! Thank you! I no longer have to wear this sweater around my waist because I’m ashamed.'”
Artists often tire of performing their longtime hit for decades, preferring to do new songs. Not Mix. He loves “Baby Got Back.”
“Not only do I love it, I’m a fan,” he said. “I’ll give you an example. I’m a big Gary Numan fan. Obviously, you want to hear ‘Cars,’ you want to hear ‘Metal,’ ‘I Die You Die.’ He shows up and he does all these new tracks and when he left you could have heard crickets. Everybody was like, ‘Is he gonna come back out? Is there an encore?’ And I never will forget how that felt. So I understand why people pay to see me, I have no illusions of grandeur there. I just walk in, I give them a 10 to 15 minute version of ‘Baby Got Back.’ I will jump off in the crowd, walk through the crowd, no security. You’re lucky to be in the game at this point, lucky to be around, so I appreciate it.”
To hear more with Sir Mix-A-Lot, and there is plenty more, listen to my podcast Your Last Meal where ever you get podcasts, on iTunes, or listen here.
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