Bun fight: the story behind Baby Got Back

Sir Mix-A-Lot on tour in 1992
Sir Mix-A-Lot on tour in 1992 Credit:  Hulton Archive

The minute super-producer Rick Rubin heard the finished version of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back, he said: “People are gunna be talking about this 20 years from now”. He wasn’t wrong.

While Sir Mix-a-Lot had achieved platinum sales before the release of Baby Got Back as an independent rapper, it was such a leviathan hit it rendered him a one-hit wonder in the wider music industry. The song was only beaten to the best-selling of 1992 by Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. Sir Mix-a-Lot, real name Anthony Ray, reckons he’s “definitely made over a hundred million” off the back of Baby Got Back.

In 2014, US rapper Nicki Minaj created the song of the summer with Anaconda, a bombastic celebration of the female form which heavily sampled Sir Mix-a-Lot’s original paean to the posterior. Much as Anaconda followed Baby Got Back’s footsteps in terms of a graphic, bum-focussed video and libidinous lyrics, it also echoed the 1992 song’s chart success, becoming Minaj’s highest charting single in her home country and spending eight weeks in its top 10.

Sir Mix-a-Lot in 2016
Sir Mix-a-Lot in 2016 Credit:  Rex Features

But while Anaconda provided the soundtrack to a zeitgeist – 2014 was dubbed “Year of the Booty” by a number of major publications after Beyoncé featured gold buttocks in her stage design, Meghan Trainor topped charts with All About That Bass, Marvel’s ludicrously proportioned Spider-Woman inspired scorn and mirth and Kim Kardashian posed nude for Paper magazine – Baby Got Back never really went away.

A quarter of a century on, Baby Got Back is still a floorfiller, from student unions to DJ sets, but the discussion it inspired remains as relevant at a time when reappropriation, diversity and representation in the media continue to fuel conversations daily. Here’s how it was made:

‘Rick Rubin’s very interested in signing you’

It’s easy to see why a man called Sir Mix-a-Lot, whose international introduction was on a giant pair of buttocks, could be seen as a novelty act. But the Seattle-based rapper had been racking up considerable success on his own label, NastyMix, since the late Eighties. His debut album Swass went platinum with barely any airplay or video exposure, and Sir Mix-a-Lot went on to tour with hip-hop behemoths Public Enemy, NMW and Ice-T.

Among those listening to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s early output were US super-producer Rick Rubin, who kicked back with Beastie Boys to the rapper’s first major hit, Posse on Broadway. “We loved it”, Rubin later said.

Rick Rubin in 1998
Rick Rubin in 1998 Credit: Rex Features

By the turn of the Nineties, Sir Mix-a-Lot was, as Spin Magazine would sum up in 1992: “one of the few rappers who is actually a multimillionaire, a shrewd entrepreneur, owner of his own label, Rhyme Cartel, a successful black businessman”. But he was also tiring of NastyMix. “We were in a nasty lawsuit,” Sir Mix-a-Lot recalled in 2003. “I thought it was over, actually. Then we get a call from someone who worked for Rick Rubin. He was like, ‘Rick's very interested in signing you. Would you like to come down and meet him?’”

Sir Mix-a-Lot didn’t need asking twice: he got on a plane to Los Angeles and met the producer, who even at that point had become highly regarded thanks to his work with Run DMC, Beastie Boys and LL Cool L. “I wasn’t stupid”, he later told AV Club. “I was like, ‘I got Rick Rubin. If I could sell a million units independently, then what could I do on a major?’” Sir Mix-a-Lot signed to Def American in 1991, and started work on his third album, Mack Daddy.

‘The kind of thing that women in my position went through made Mix angry’

Amylia Dorsey-Rivas and Sir Mix-a-Lot
Amylia Dorsey-Rivas and Sir Mix-a-Lot Credit: Facebook.com/AmyliatheVoice

Amylia Dorsey was raised in Seattle as an adopted child, and grew up in a big household. “My parents had about 40 foster kids,” she told Vulture. She became a model and actress, and met Mix-A-Lot on a video shoot in their home city. The pair started dating, and embarked upon a relationship that would last for nearly a decade. Sir Mix-a-Lot found much to admire in Dorsey, namely her proportions: “You think J.Lo had a body? No contest!” he’d later remark.  

Dorsey was one of the black women who would inspire Sir Mix-a-Lot to write Baby Got Back. In the late Eighties, the media presentation of what was beautiful was limited. In particular, it was young, female, white and skinny.

“It was something we only talked about in a locker room or a club before Baby,” Sir Mix-a-Lot would comment years later, “But black women got the song immediately.”

Despite her high cheekbones, dark eyes and arched eyebrows, Dorsey struggled to secure modelling work - and she blamed her curves. “It was my experience that he was writing about”, she’d later say. “The kind of thing that women in my position went through made Mix angry.”

The tipping point came while Dorsey and Sir Mix-a-Lot were watching the Super Bowl, and a Budweiser advertisement came on during the break. It featured white models frolicking on a yacht with a dog named Spuds McKenzie. When retelling Baby Got Back’s origin story, Sir Mix-a-Lot would repeatedly compare them to “Stop signs”, because of their slim frames and big hair. The pair felt compelled to write a song about the kind of beauty that wasn’t seen in the media at the time: mainly, that of the African-American woman.

As Sir Mix-a-Lot sincerely told Spin: “The song doesn’t just say I like large butts, you know? The song is talking about women who damn near kill themselves to try to look like these beanpole models that you see in Vogue magazine. That’s not necessarily what people like to see; they look at these magazines and they give you the impression that that is beautiful and anything less is ugly.”

It started with Dorsey, whose upbringing had encouraged a keen aptitude for mimicking voices and accents. “The one [at the beginning of] “Baby” was based on girls I grew up around,” she told Vulture. “My friend and I would constantly do that voice back and forth as a joke: I’d call her and say: ‘hell-loh’ or ‘ohmygawd!!!’ He’d heard me do the voice many times; it comes the easiest of all the voices I do, and he loved it.”

Baby Got Back’s opening line, that of a faux Valley Girl horrified by the prideful posterior of a black woman, was the first bit of the song to be laid down. Then Sir Mix-a-Lot wrote the lyrics.

“Originally it was going to be a serious song, but we realised that if we made it serious, they wouldn’t take it serious. It would just be dismissed,” he told Vlad TV. “I was like, how do I make this statement but keep it tongue-in-cheek? And I did it.”

Sir Mix-a-Lot applied a beat inspired by his love of techno and Eighties electronic music. Gary Numan and Kraftwerk inspired the heavy, but fast, rhythms that set Baby Got Back apart from the gangsta rap that was emerging in the early Nineties. Then he set it aside, sent it to Rubin and didn’t think much more of it. “This was the second to last song I’d made on the record,” he told Vlad TV. “So I thought I was doing a filler track.”

‘Rubin said: “Get ready to make a lot of money”’

“I remember I felt very strongly about Baby Got Back”, Rubin told XXL magazine. “It wasn’t so much the hook that I liked, there was just something about the song that really felt special from the first time he played it for me. I never really think so much about commercial success, I usually just think about records that move me, and ‘Baby Got Back’ was one that moved me.”

Speaking to Rubin after he’d sent the demo, Sir Mix-a-Lot said the producer’s initial reaction was one of silence. Half an hour later, Rubin called the rapper back. “He said, ‘Get ready to make a lot of money’”, Sir Mix-a-Lot recalled on Vlad TV. “I said, ‘S---, Rick Rubin says get ready to make a lot of money. Better polish that song off.”

Rubin suggested changes. The main one was to let the most emphatic of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s lines hang in the air, unaccompanied by beat or sample. “He wanted the lines that could offend people accentuated”, Sir Mix-a-Lot explained. In the process, he paved the way for Minaj’s key Anaconda sample.

‘I was wearing a brown shirt and brown pants and I saw that I looked like dancing turd’

Sir Mix-A-Lot in the video for Baby Got Back
Sir Mix-A-Lot in the video for Baby Got Back

Baby Got Back didn’t make Sir Mix-a-Lot a lot of money straight away. While Rubin wanted to release the single as the lead track off Mack Daddy, the rapper wanted to put One Time’s Got No Case out first. Rubin conceded, and was proved right: hip-hop DJs didn’t play it, and the song had little impact.

This gave the team more time to work on the video for Baby Got Back, which Rubin also had a clear idea on. He suspected that Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Seattle suburban hip-hop would be set off well by a video directed by Adam Bernstein, who had impressed Rubin with his videos for alt-rock bands They Might Be Giants and the B-52s.

Bernstein was recruited in Rubin’s time-honoured way: “When you had a meeting with Rick, he would arrive in his Rolls Royce, and you would get in and he would play whichever song really loud. Which is the way I heard Baby Got Back for the first time,” Bernstein told Vulture.

Bernstein became one of the first of many to see the song as an objectification of women, but he had other priorities. “ I needed to get out of New York because I broke up with my girlfriend and she got the apartment. So doing this video was a matter of good timing”.

'The song is talking about women who damn near kill themselves to try to look like these beanpole models'
'The song is talking about women who damn near kill themselves to try to look like these beanpole models'

Bernstein looked to the “ass-obsessed” French fashion photographer Jean-Paul Goude, and decided to build an enormous pair of buttocks for Sir Mix-a-Lot to rap from in the video. They took the cue to paint it gold from his lyrics: “Some brothers wanna play that hard role/And tell you that the butt ain’t gold”. It was so big, and so shiny, that it almost temporarily blinded Sir Mix-a-Lot. “I walked on the set, and the first thing I saw was a 50-foot yellow ass. They said it was gonna be big, but it didn’t make any sense until you saw that it was as big as a house. There was a ladder going up the backside, and I was running all around that ass.”

Until that point, Sir Mix-a-Lot and his entourage’s greatest involvement in the video had been in the casting of the dancers. The rapper told Vlad TV: “they recorded a bunch of girls on a test reel and they sent it all up to me. When I got to LA only three of the girls I’d picked ended up in the video. Not that the other girls were bad, they were athletic, they were in good shape, but some of them couldn’t dance. And I was like, “well they all ain’t got it then. The rest of the girls just need to look good.”

The Josephine Baker-inspired shot in Baby Got Back
The Josephine Baker-inspired shot in Baby Got Back

It was an activity that the crew continued throughout Sir Mix-a-Lot’s subsequent summer tour. When Spin went to interview him, in Houston, Texas, the journalist, Brian Keezer, detailed: “A DJ is conducting a live remote scorecard on the Big Butt dancers’ behinds on a scale of 1 to 20. He gives Shureen, the “big butt” from the video, a 20. He gives Zina a 22. Ytosse, a dead ringer for Vanessa Williams, attired in a sheer, clinging, black, butt-hugging dress, cringes at the point where the legitimacy of candor has given way to egregious leering and exploitation. “Puh-leese!” she murmurs angrily.”

The budget for the dancers’ costumes was somewhat slimmer than that for the enormous bum. Designer Dana Hollister was given $500 to dress the cast, which meant that the Josephine Baker-inspired scene was created with bananas Hollister had personally covered in glitter.

Sir Mix-a-Lot wanted to wear an entirely brown outfit, and took umbrage with Hollister’s rebuking of it – she later claimed he raised his glock at her, something the rapper laughed off. “I wasn’t having it,” Hollister told Vulture. “‘Are you f------ kidding me? A gun?’ He was wearing all brown, and he would have been standing on the butt, looking like … you know!”

Sir Mix-a-Lot’s crew had come to the same conclusion: “I was wearing a brown shirt and brown pants, and they were taking Polaroids, and I saw that I looked like dancing turd,” he recalled. “My boys still ride me on that.”

‘I became the forbidden fruit’

The enormous inflatable bum in 1993 movie Falling Down
The enormous inflatable bum in 1993 movie Falling Down

Baby Got Back entered Billboard Top 100 chart at Number 42, but had reached Number 1 within two months. MTV were being inundated with requests for the video, but received as many complaints. A ban was put in place. “Word came down [from standards] that Baby Got Back, while a great, hilarious video, was not going to air,” said Patti Galuzzi, then a music programmer at the network.

Sir Mix-a-Lot was devastated. Just as he’d reached the peak of his success, it looked like it could all come crashing down. “I was looking for jobs!”, he told Sioux City Journal. But then Rubin’s publicist called. “I’ll never forget what she said,” he recalled. “She said, ‘Today, you’re Elvis Presley and you just went on the Ed Sullivan Show and shook your hips a little bit too much.’ And I knew exactly what she meant. I became the forbidden fruit, which meant that the song would live on forever. And it did.”

Rubin span the ban into a campaign. He made old-fashioned, engraved desk plaques which read: “Call MTV Re: Mix-A-Lot” and left them on the desks of every member of staff at Def American.

Word got around, and Galuzzi wound up sharing a table with Sir Mix-a-Lot and his manager one evening during a radio conference. He explained the motivation for his song, and convinced Galuzzi, a woman who described herself as someone with “back and front”, to go to Judy McGrath, vice-president of creative at MTV. “With me standing there with my curves,” Galuzzi said, “she was sympathetic”.

Sir Mix-a-Lot
Sir Mix-a-Lot

Their reaction was to restrict its air time, until after 9pm, and only after the video had been edited. While Sir Mix-a-Lot was pleased the video had returned, he wasn’t thrilled with the insistence that so many buttocks were left on the cutting-room floor: “They made me edit all the girls with the really big asses out of the video anyway! If you look at the video, you go, ‘Those girls' asses aren't that big’.”

There were, however, bigger asses travelling around America. With the video on lockdown, and Sir Mix-a-Lot reluctant to fly – and therefore tour – the label took an imaginative route to promote Baby Got Back. “We decided that we would tour a giant, inflatable ass,” explained Dan Charnas, who was vice-president of A&R at Def American at the time. “We would put it on top of record stores and radio stations, or in the parking lot and blast the song.”

The dirigible needed frequent repairs, after people shot bullets at it, but proved so popular that the label commissioned another. The quote on their press release read: “If nothing else, this was the most expensive piece of ass we ever paid for”.

‘This is a new era, and Nicki’s in charge’

It didn’t take long for Baby Got Back to inspire spoof versions. Jamie Foxx’s Baby Got Snacks for US sketch series In Living Colour was among the first: a near-perfect pastiche of Bernstein’s video that celebrated the hungrier lady. But dozens of others followed: Baby Got Back has been riffed in everything from a Burger King advertisement to video game Dragon Age II, picking up parodies in shows as diverse as Spongebob Squarepants, The Simpsons and Friends and films Jackass: The Movie and Another Cinderella Story.

A considerable chunk of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s butt-related fortune stems from the fact he held onto the publishing rights, which he is proud of having leveraged widely: “The reason you own publishing is to get on in your career. You still monetise those tracks and you can continue to record music with integrity”.

Perhaps the tribute he is most pleased with, however, is Minaj’s. Not even because it brought his work back into the charts, creating a sensation that mirrored Baby Got Back’s remarkably closely, but because her efforts showed him how far his intentions – to create a wider diversity of beauty standard - had been fulfilled.

“This is a new era, and Nicki’s in charge”, he commented in 2014. “How are they going to say no to a woman talking about some asses? Beautiful.”

 

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