On the surface, Sir Mix-A-Lot’s 1992 hit single “Baby Got Back” is a goofy song about butts with an equally goofy music video about butts. However, if you consider the song in its historical context, it has a lot more to offer.
At the time, many listeners filed “Baby Got Back” away as a mere novelty song. But, as Mix-A-Lot (real name Anthony Ray) and several others told Vulture in 2013, the song was a direct response to the pervasiveness of stick-thin 90s models. Mix’s girlfriend at the time, Amylia Dorsey-Rivas (who provided the voice for the iconic intro “Oh my God, Becky, look at her butt”), was partially responsible for inspiring the song.
“My background is such that being a woman of color—I’m half-Mexican, half-Black, and have always been curvy—was not appreciated at all,” Dorsey-Rivas said at the time. “Where I grew up, in the suburbs of Seattle, if you weren’t built like Paris Hilton, you weren’t appreciated.”
She explained that she worked at a modeling agency, teaching runway classes, but she never got much modeling work. “And neither did anyone who looked like me,” she said. “The kind of thing that women in my position went through made Mix angry. He’d say, ‘I don’t understand why you can’t get modeling work,’ and I’d say, ‘Look behind me.’ This was my experience that he was writing about.”
Sir Mix-A-Lot’s ‘Baby Got Back’ Was a Direct Response to the ‘Heroin Chic’ Body Image of the 90s
Sir Mix-A-Lot learned about the curvy woman’s struggle at a time when nearly being a skeleton was not only fashionable, but praised. The “heroin chic” look persisted into the 2000s, before it eventually gave way to the body positivity movement (which also has its own issues). Still, the pervasive mindset that thinness equals moral purity persists today, simply taking on different masks over the years.
But in the early 90s, when the look was sweeping the nation, Sir Mix-A-Lot saw something else that frustrated him enough to write “Baby Got Back”.
“Amy [Dorsey-Rivas] and I were at a hotel on tour when we saw one of the Spuds MacKenzie ads for Budweiser during the Super Bowl,” Mix explained. “You’d see these girls in the ad: Each one was shaped like a stop sign, with big hair [and] straight up-and-down bird legs. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I was so sick of that s**t.”
He added that Dorsey-Rivas never urged him to write the song. Instead, having a personal connection to her and hearing about her struggles, bolstered by seeing it on TV, naturally inspired him.
“She was an actress, and she started admitting that she felt like she lost a lot of parts because of her hourglass figure,” said Mix. “I knew for a fact that many artists felt that if they didn’t use a skinny-model-type woman in their video, then mainstream America would reject the song.”
‘People Are Gonna Be Talking About This 20 Years From Now’
Sir Mix-A-Lot stated that he “did not agree” with casting only thin models in music videos. He even used peak Dolly Parton as an example, saying, “a lot of white guys were like ‘daammn!’” But Mix went on to explain that when he did casting calls for his previous music videos, curvy women still wouldn’t audition. “They thought they didn’t have a chance,” he said.
“Unless you were in the hood, women who had curves … who ran five miles a day, with a washboard, six-pack stomach and a nice round, beautiful, supple ass … wore sweaters around their waist!” he added. The social shame around having an ass was so pervasive, and not only that, it was often contradictory.
“When [men are] crooning to women about how beautiful they are in an R&B song, the ladies you see in the video don’t reflect what those guys like,” Mix explained. “Every time an R&B video was on, I heard women say, ‘I just saw him down in Oakland, and his girls wasn’t like that.’ That made me think that this was more than a funny song, and it wrote itself.”
According to Sir Mix-A-Lot, the first cut of “Baby Got Back” wasn’t as up-tempo as the final version. He was working with Rick Rubin as producer, and Rubin suggested the tempo change. Additionally, he suggested cutting the backing track for those big punchy lines, like “My anaconda don’t want none” and so on. With those tweaks, Mix went on to write one of the most iconic songs about big butts ever.
“As soon as [Rick Rubin] heard the finished track, he said, ‘People are gonna be talking about this twenty years from now,’” Mix recalled. And we’re still talking about it 34 years later.
Photo via YouTube/American Recordings LLC
The post How a Budweiser Commercial Inspired Sir Mix-A-Lot to Write His 1992 Hit, ‘Baby Got Back’ appeared first on VICE.
