November 16, 2022 • 53 mins
“Oh… my… God, Becky. Look. At. Her. Butt.” It may be one of the most unforgettable opening lines of a song in the history of popular music. Say those words and they instantly conjure images of rump-shaking models, a pair of very annoying Valley girls, Cosmopolitan magazine, Jane Fonda, Ross and Rachel’s baby on Friends, Shrek, high school dances, bar mitzvahs, keggers, karaoke parties, and wedding receptions. The impact of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” was massive, its legacy undeniable. The song was big, thick, and juicy then, and it will forever be big, thick, and juicy.
This week, we talk to the director of the “Baby Got Back” music video, the MTV exec who initially refused to air it, Mix himself, and the iconic, big-bootied model at the center of it all.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Where Were You In ninety two is a production of
I Heart Radio. Oh my God, Becky look at her.
But it may be one of the most unforgettable opening
lines of a song in the history of popular music.
Say those words and they instantly conjure images of rump
(00:23):
shaking models, a pair of very annoying valley girls, a
man hanging out in the crack of an enormous gold
ass Carsopolitan magazine, Jane Fonda, Ross and Rachel's Baby, ond Friends,
Burger King, Shrek, Nicki Minaj, Red Beans, and Rice, high
school dances about Mitzvah's, Kegger's, karaoke, birthday parties, sports games,
(00:49):
wedding receptions, okay, basically anything but funerals. The impact of
Sir mix a Lot's Baby Got Back was massive, Its
legacy refutable and eternal. The song was big, thick and
juicy then and it will forever be big, thick and juicy. Well,
they auditioned every and I gotta say every light scanned
(01:12):
girl out here in Los Angeles, because you remember that's
what they were doing it. They're very you know, they
can be colorous like that. That's Almond, the first black
woman you see in the music video for Baby Got Back.
She's the gorgeous ample booty goddess slowly spinning around on
a platform towering above white Bucky and her nasty judge
white friend, posing in a tight fitting yellow dress, all
(01:34):
saltry and his Almond puts it sinewy, cast in the
glow of the spotlight against an endless pink and purple sky.
Like so many curvy women of color in Almon didn't
see much of herself on TV and films or music videos.
Like she said, many women like her were even getting auditions.
By the way, yes, Almond does go by just her
(01:55):
first name. She's earned it. So Max had already told
them what he was looking for, right, So they still
sent them the light span girls, you know, kind of
straight up and down, that type of girl, right, And
then he said he had to have a meeting. He said,
this is not what I'm looking for. I told you
guys what I was looking for. My agent didn't even
submit me. It was somebody working with her saw my
(02:17):
picture and submitted me, sent me on the audition. I
was a very last person to auditions when Sir mix
a lot unleashed Baby Got Back in May of the
rapper had no idea to hit he had in his hands.
That hit would go on to spend five weeks at
number one on the Billboard Hot one Singles chart and
become the second best selling single of that year after
(02:40):
Wait for It Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You. Yep.
Right behind the theme from the Bodyguard was the theme
from the Booty Guard. The man who cherished and wished
to protect large asses at all costs. Nix would have
taken a bullet for one of these bubbly beautiful backsides,
but he wouldn't pull a gun on someone over one. Okay,
(03:02):
more on that later. But if it became a whopping success,
some listeners didn't know what to make of Baby Got Back?
Was it just a fleeting, frivolous novelty song, yet another
example of a male hip hop artist objectifying women, a
celebration of the real life voluptuous black female form and
therefore an honest to goodness body positive feminist anthem. My answer,
(03:27):
I think Sir ms Lot was having his cake and
eating it too, but he'd be the first to admit it.
And regardless of what you thought or think of Baby
Got Back, You other brothers and sisters and humans can't
deny that there had never been, nor will there ever
be again, a song fight like it. Welcome to Where
(03:55):
Were You In ninety two? A podcast in which I
your host Jason Lampier, look back at the major hits,
one hit wonders, shocking news stories, and irresistible scandals that
shaped what might be the wildest, most eclectic, most controversial
twelve months of music ever. It was the year of
big butt anthems and he breaking hearts and Madonna's sex books.
(04:18):
It was Yere the Boys to Men and Whitney Houston
shattered Billboard chart records, while George Michael, YouTube and TLC
confronted the AIDS crisis had on. It was the year
that introduced us to grunge, g funk, and write said Fred.
Featuring interviews with critics, obsessives, industry big wigs, directors, producers,
and the artists themselves, this series poses the question, what
(04:42):
was it about that made it so groundbreaking, so riotous,
so fun and so that ship crazy. This week we
look back at Sir mix a Lot's huge hit and
as far as the charts were concerned, only hit Baby
Got That and induct us owe to the Black Female
booty that took America by storm, arriving with an innuendo
(05:05):
pack video that Empty v initially rejected because of its
racy visuals. Yet the song not only helped spark the
body positivity movement two decades before it became the creed
occur of women all over the country, it also provided
a fresh, more dimensional and necessary representation of black women
to its audiences. How and why did this hip hop
(05:26):
classic leave such a vast pop cultural imprint, Why does
its legacy still loom so large today? To answer those questions,
we first have to look at the man behind this
undeniable tribute to behind Anthony ray A k A Sir
mix a lot his dowdy Abe explains, and It's two
(05:48):
thousand twenty book Emerald Street, A History of Hip Hop
and Seattle Nasty Mixed Records was a surprising success story
given that hip hop was primarily coming out of New
York City at the time. Seattle wasn't even on most
hip hop band's radars. Unlike grunge, which became synonymous with Seattle,
no quintessential Seattle hip hop sound existed. That notion was
(06:10):
practically laughable. Yet here was mix releasing two albums in
the late nineteen eighties, Swaz and Seminar that eventually want Platinum.
Mix grew up in the city Central District, and when
he had no musical training, he was a big fan
of the German electronic music pioneers craft Work, and he
became adept at using not only turntables, but machines and
equipment like the Rolling eight away drum machine, corgan Mode synthesizers,
(06:33):
and the Commodore sixty four computer to create tracks in
his apartment. He was also heavily influenced by the Emerald
Street Boys. The first hip hop artist to break out
in Seattle, Mix first made a name for himself performing
at weekend parties the Boys and Girls Club in the
(06:55):
Central District. For one dollar, guests could hang out in
the gym and listen to him scratch records, splay samples
together and wrapped in nasty res. Roderiguez, the host of
K fox's Fresh Tracks, the first popular rap radio show
in Seattle, went to one of Mixes sets. Impressed by
his virtuosity, Roderiguez invited Mix to play his music on
(07:17):
k Fox, where he eventually became the most requested artists
over the likes of Prince and Michael Jackson. Soon after,
the pair combined their names to launch Nasty Mix Records
along with their partners Outlock and Greg Jones. After putting
out a couple of vps, Mixed under reputation outside Seattle
for his single Square Dance Rap, which in Night six
(07:39):
landed him an invitation to England's first ever hip hop festival,
fresh Fest UK, where he performed with acts like Africa
Mambada and Grandmaster Flash in The Furious Five. A year later,
he released Posse on Broadway, a tribute to his home city,
partially inspired by the Beastie Boys Paul Revere and which
Mix shouted out Seattle landmarks like Renar Avenue and the
(08:00):
local burger chain dick S Drive. In It's video ran
on MTV, and the song peaked at number seventy on
the Boboard Hot one chart. Posse on Broadway was a
bit of a hip hop arty. While peers like n
w A referred to women as bitches and Hose Mix
shutdown dismissive and violent behavior towards women. The cuts lyrics
(08:21):
were counting how he maced a man he saw about
to beat his girlfriend, where so much of hip hop
at the time was filled with rage, annie police rhetoric,
and accounts of growing up marginalized in poor. Mix infuses
songs on his debut album Swas with humor and positivity,
detailing his aspirations to get rich, get famous, and get lucky.
(08:42):
Swaz became the biggest selling album from an Indecattlebles label
in years. It mixes second album, Seminar, had its more
playful moments. For example, the song my Hoopeddie was about
the rapper chugging along and a conker well his Mercedes
Benz was a repair shop. It was more socially consciousnes
(09:04):
Swaws The Peek a Boo Game, for example, addressed team pregnancy,
the sex trade, and sexual abuse. Meanwhile, National Anthem was
a critique of extreme patriotism in America's foreign policy. Mix's
ambition paid off. He scored interviews with the already popular
yomtd Raps and the t S Rap City, and, like
(09:25):
its predecessor, Seminar one platinum, selling more than a million copies.
But if Mix was achieving a new level of stardom
on his own terms, things were hardly perfect, and they
were about to change drastically. While Mix was still green.
He knew he wasn't happy with the promotion of Seminar.
Taking cues from his one time tourmate public enemies Chuck d,
(09:46):
he decided to stand up for himself. He tapped Ricardo Fraser,
a precocious internal Nasty Mix, to be his manager. Fun
Fact Fraser reps Mixed to this day. Sminar marked the
end of Mixes contract with Nasty Mix, who at that
point ode mixed north of three hundred thousand dollars. He
and the label went to court, and after spending a
(10:06):
boatload of cash, Mix ultimately got his old masters. Nasty
Mix shuttered in and Mix was free to secure a
new label. When asked today, Mix says he has no
animosity toward an est Mix. Yeah. Despite losing a ton
of money, Mix found himself on the market at an
opportune time. Hip hop at least a tame or less angry,
(10:29):
more accessible okay meaning more accessible to white listeners. Strain
of hip hop was building. Scheme. MC Hammer had become
the first hip hop artist to achieve Diamonds status with
his ninety nine album Please Hammer Don't Hurt Him, featuring
the huge hit you Can't Touch This Meanwhile, Vanilla Ices
Smash Ice Ice Baby had reached number one and gone platinum.
(10:49):
Enter Rick Reuben, after leaving Deaf Jam Records, the label
he founded with the russell Simpons have propelled the careers
of hip hop titans like the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J,
Public Enemy and run d ms See. The producer Mastermind,
had just founded Deaf American Records. He gave Mix his
own death label, Ryan Cartel Records. Ricardo Fraser would serve
(11:10):
as president and Mix would be CEO. Mix's first release
on the label was his third album, Mac Daddy, the
record that contained the single that would catapult Mix his
own career. Sir Maxilla had written about social issues facing
(11:34):
women before, but a new song he was working on,
Baby Got Back, was personal. He'd been dating an aspiring
actress and model, Amalia Dorsey Rivas, who was struggling to
find work because of her size, particularly the size of
her backside. She was half black, half Mexican, and curvy.
One night, when the couple was watching his Super Bowl
(11:55):
in a hotel room during one of Mixes tours, they
saw a spud Mackenzie Budweiser ad. The models in it
were sticks in including the soul black model in it.
If Mix was shocked and incensed, I'm only it wasn't
at all. She got it, as she said in a
two thousand thirteen Vulture interview, where I grew up in
(12:16):
the suburbs of Seattle. If you weren't built like Paris Hilton,
you weren't appreciated. I worked at a modeling agency as
a teenager, and I taught hair, makeup and runway classes
to six ft tall girls who ate ninety pounds. But
I didn't get much work, and neither did anyone who
looked like me. This piste mix off. In fact, a
lack of adequate and accurate representation of black women in
(12:38):
the media period pissed him off. In his mind, Hollywood
in the music industry had been under serving these women
for decades. The early nineties were no different. I trapped
down Sir Mix a lot to talk about his inspiration
for the song. If you go back to that era,
there were two types of African American women that succeeded
in Hollywood. Basically, you either had to assimilate to white
(13:01):
culture or you were the underestimated made that worked for
a white family and they would advise the children on
what to do correctly because mom just didn't get it,
or you'd be the street wise hooker on an episode
of Law and Order. Um and and that was it.
Mix couldn't stand seeing black women consistently reduced to stereotypes,
(13:23):
nor did he agree with the standards of beauty the
magazines like Cosmopolitan or propagating. To him, the rails and
women on those pages were neither realistic nor attractive. He
thought women with curves were sexy, and knew plenty of
other black men did too, Yet women with hourglass figures
were nowhere to be found in the hip hop and
R and B videos he was seeing. His outrage incited
(13:45):
him to write a hard hitting track protesting the absence
of real black women in the media. But as the
song came together, Mixed realized its lyrics were actually pretty funny.
Maybe he thought he should lean into the humor. Of course,
anyone who's heard Baby Got Back knows that it's the
humor that sells it. Floating effortlessly over a beat sampled
(14:07):
from Channel one early Detroit technosong technocolor Mixes Versus managed
to be both ridiculous and sublime, even if it teeters
on the edge of sounding like a commercial jingle. It's
rhymes are clever, hooky, and just weird enough to leave
an impression. Oh rump of smooth skin, you say you
(14:29):
want to get in my bends? Will use me? Use
me because you ain't that average groupie. Okay. Notice here
how Mixed subverts a classic fairy tale and takes the
submissive role. Okay, that's clever. Shake that healthy butt. Okay.
If that ain't body positive, then I don't know what is.
(14:51):
I'll keep my women like flow Joe Okay, who in
Hip Hop in two name checked Olympic gold medal winning
track and field athletes in their mus Rick Ruben Genius
city Is had already pushed Mix to make Baby Got
Back mar Bat, and he had another clever idea. When
Mix delivered a punchline, the music would fade out to
(15:12):
really accentuate it in case, for example, my Anaconda don't
want none unless you got buttons on. But the most
brilliant artistic choice and twist was Mixed and listing none
other than his girlfriend Emilia Dorsey revas to voice that
Caddy Valley girl talking to Becky at the beginning of
(15:34):
the song Dorsey Revas was adopted and had grown up
with various foster kids and picked up a ton of accents.
A half black woman mocking the voice of a white
woman mocking a black woman on her figure in a
number one hit single that's going to be one of
the most amazing funk cues and pop music history. Still,
(16:00):
the mix was pleased with the results. He never planned
to release Baby Got Back as a single. Dan Charnes
as an author and professor of music history and Writing
at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the
Tische School of the Arts in New York University, but
in two he was in Los Angeles working in the
rap department of Rick Ruben's Deaf American Recordings. He eventually
(16:22):
became its vice president of A and R. But after
Reuben signed Mixed Turance was tasked with choosing the first
single from his upcoming third album, The Problem. Turnus was
not a fantom mixes music compared to the hip hop
artist he had been promoting back in New York, like
Brundy M. C special Ed and Rob Bates, he thought
mixes stuff sounded unremarkable and derivative, and particularly too similar
(16:46):
to the Beastio Boys. When he sat down to listen
to a cassette of Mix's new material, he thought the
first two tracks were just fine, and then the third song,
I think was this song that began, Oh my god, Becky,
look at her butt right in this whole song unfolds
(17:06):
right and yeah, it's funny, you know, like I like
big butts and I cannot lie. But as the lyrics,
you know, as the sort of the verses are are
spooling out, I'm I'm realizing that this is actually a
political song. Right. That's churnis we're calling to me. The
moment he knew Mixed wasn't just waxing horny. He was
(17:28):
tapping into the zeitgeist. He was onto something. That's funny
because Amery Baraka's daughter, Lisa Jones wrote an essay for
The Village Voice a few weeks before I got that
cassette called Venus Envy, in which she talked about how
the white beauty aesthetic of very very rail, thin women, tall, pale,
(17:55):
very few curves, how that was starting to be over
own and subverted essentially by black popular culture and by
artists like Janet Jackson, by the appearance of models like, um,
I think her name was Beverly Peel. So Lisa Jones,
she was, you know, talking about this this model who
(18:19):
suddenly appeared on the pages of a major women's magazine
with this sort of high booty. As she said right now,
this really wasn't the kind of figure that appeared in
a women's magazine at the time, and she was she
talked about in the same year that Public Enemy had
released an album called Fear of a Black Planet. Lisa
(18:41):
Jones was talking about, you know, lifting the fear of
a big black butt essentially, and so there was a
feeling that culture was changing, and that culture was changing
in part because of music and in particular hip hop.
And in that moment, to me, I became a mix
a lot fan because this was sort of a rallying cry,
(19:04):
right like, oh my god, mix lots of feminists, you know,
in my year old mind. Charnis was electrified by the song.
It marked the beginning of him starting to let go
of some of his East Coast hip hop snobbery. He
called Reuben and told him they had to make Baby
Got Back the first single form mcdaddy. Reuben agreed, mixed
(19:27):
and not he really wanted the first single to be
One Time's Got No Case, a tougher, more serious track
about racial profiling that sampled Stevie wonders, you haven't done nothing,
he feared Baby Got Back sounded to jokey. After some debate,
Mixed got his way. One time He's Got No Case
was released as the first single. I put it out,
(19:49):
great video, but it flocked. He said it would, and
all right, his towel between his legs, Mixed agreed to
put out Baby Got Back his mac daddy's next single
and video. Little did he know that the decision would
change his life forever. Next up, after the break, we
dive into the bonker story behind the Baby Got Back video,
(20:11):
from Mixes Creative Demand's final ASTs approval for its dancers,
to the creative tension over its crazy concept, to MTVS
refusal to air it because if it's offensive content also
was or wasn't a gun pulled out set Producer Rick
(20:38):
Ruben new Baby Got Back to be massive, so to
execute his vision for the video, he was going to
need the right director, someone who could drive Mix his
message home, but also serve up the right visual nods
and winks to reflect the songs. Sauciness and match it's
point production. Reuben was a big fan of Adam Bernstein,
who had created eccentric cooking videos for All Rock Goofballs.
(21:01):
They might be Giants and the Beastie Boys, but it
was best known for directing the video for the BF
two smash Love Shack. I had been approached earlier to
do the Big Old Button, and I was like, Oh,
I don't know if I want to do a body
part video, you know what I mean, like the women
that you know, like my production company was owned by
two women. I didn't. I was very I was concerned about,
(21:25):
you know, objectifying and stuff like that. That's Adam Bernstein
telling me about his initial reservations about taking on Baby
Got Back. However, after really listening to the song, he
realized it wasn't just about objectification. It was a celebration
and like really really funny. It wasn't just someone you know,
(21:45):
saying I like big butts, although he does say in
the song he likes big butts, but it was it
was about like what what the mainstream kind of norms
of beauty were for the culture, and like what was
beautiful to him? So you know, and what was beautiful
and black culture. Bernstein met with Mixed to discuss the
concept for the video. As he tells it, Mix and
(22:07):
envisioned himself emerging from an enormous ass. Okay, Fortunately Bernstein
dissuaded him from doing that, but mixes adamant about maintaining
a certain level of creating control. One of Mix's biggest
stipulations was that he wanted to sign off on all
the model dancers cast in the video, specifically on their asses,
(22:31):
and Mix wanted personal approval over the booty. He wanted
personal personal approval over all the butts. So I was
in the kind of, like slightly a funny position of
having to ask all these beautiful dancers if I could
take a polar rate of their butt, and most of
them thought it was pretty funny. And then we we
(22:52):
made a select and we sent this. We made a
kind of this is before why do you say? The Internet?
And we made kind of like a giant grid of
all the butts, and we fed exit up to Seattle
for Mixed to approve. Okay, I'm picturing Carrie Matheson on
Homeland with her crazy wall of clues and leads, except
(23:15):
this time it's a bunch of Spandex covered asses For
her part. Almond says she wasn't bothered at all by
Bernstein asking to take a picture of her butt. She
was there as she told me to work. Incidentally, you
can see the snapshot of her butt flash across the
screen and the music video. Burnstein and enlisted Dana Hollister,
(23:38):
the costume designer with whom he worked on the Beastie Boys,
Hey Ladies video. Tasked with dressing the dancers was only
a five budget. She got scrappy making gold shorts and
banana skirts the ladder, which she herself covered and glittered. Meanwhile,
inspired by the booty positive work of the photographer Jean
Paul Good, who also inspired that two thousand fourteen Kim
(23:59):
car to Ash, she embraked the internet, paper and magazine cover.
Bernstein crafted the ass of Mixes Dreams out of fiberglass
and pencil steel, a material used to make aircraft frames.
When Mix showed up to shoot the video at the
Chaplain Studio in Los Angeles, he was stunned and overwhelmed.
He'd never worked with a major label or seen cameras
(24:21):
that big or an ass that big. It was gold, gigantic,
and in his mind gratuitous, and he was scared shitless.
His song with a serious message was becoming like the
literal butt of the joke. It was a big yellow
paper mache looking as right, what day. I didn't know
(24:44):
it was gonna be that big. First of all, that
was like a planet that was not a that was
not a that was a planet that was like Mars,
Like they rolled it in and just I'm looking at
this thing, and I'm like, okay, And I had on
all brown and my guys just, oh my god, said yeah,
you look like a dancing turd, like a piece of
ship on the giants. Mix could live with the colossal ass,
(25:07):
and he could live with the fact that some of
the dancers were cast less for their booties and more
for their actual, you know, like dance skills. What was
non negotiable was some of the dancers. Attiger Mix would
be the first to admit he viewed these women as
sex symbols, but they weren't there for him to dismiss
and ridicule. They were unattainable goddesses he worshiped. I didn't
(25:30):
want to be a hypocrite, right, I've done song, done
songs in the past, saying I want to ask sex
with women all the time, So for me to all
of a sudden go, no, that's really never been me.
That's fake. So what I wanted to do was be me.
But not when when Mix arrived on set, he noticed
one dancer wasn't styled to look like a goddess. To Mix,
(25:52):
she looks trashy. I remember some kind of goofy shorts,
real super tight tigger kind of shorts and neck assist
and it was just really nasty, right, And I'm like,
this is the opposite of what I want. You know,
I don't want her to be hood rat. I don't
want her to be home. I wanted it to be
just fine, that's it. And I want her to be
(26:15):
seen as the norm and let these other chicks come
off as you know, haters. That model dancer was Almond,
the first black woman you see and the baby got
back video. She didn't like the outfit either. Mix came
in and he was like, no, that's what that's what
we don't I don't want that for her. Just so happened.
I had that dress that I auditioned in so that
(26:35):
addresses you see me, and that's the dress I auditioned
in and that's the dress that came out my bag
to give me out them shorts and that half tank top.
If the manager to resolved the issue of Almond styling,
costume designer in a Hollister still wasn't satisfied with Mixes
All Brown ensemble, even as friends on set thought he
looked like ship, like real ship, and a two thirteen
(26:55):
Vulture interview, she said when she pushed back on his look,
Mix pulled a gun on her. How else to follow
that up by saying he's a quote unquote lovely guy.
Bernstein has no recollection of this. Mix denies it ever happened. No,
I've always been at the guns I got I got
(27:15):
a bunch of upstairs right now, But you ain't man.
A black man traveling across state lines in the nineties
during the Gang era to make sure he could defend
himself against a makeup artist. I did get piste, but
I did not call a gun over some shorts. Ultimately,
Mix was happy with how the video turned out. Rather
than undermine it. Bernstein realized Mix's vision and folded in
(27:39):
enough humor dancers and personating Josephine Baker and a cone
bro clad Madonna with another doing kung fu style kicks,
and enough innuendo whips, cracking cute little mini buns, bouncing
on turntables, and an insane dude we get it amount
of fruit to make the video one of the most
memorable of its era. Even Bernstein's female college egs were impressed.
(28:01):
Initially they were like, I just can't believe you did that.
And then after it became this phenomenon and they began
to understand, like what the you know, what the cultural
significance of the video was in terms of beauty norms
and stuff. Then they came around and they liked it.
Bernstein wanted to become a hot shot, any winning TV guy,
directing episodes of basically every series on the planet, including
(28:24):
Breaking Bad, Thirty Rock, Fargo, and Billions, but he finally
remembers those days back when shooting music videos was the
wild West. It was still kind of an industry without
adult supervision, Like there weren't. You would just you would
kind of like just a lot of it was just
like a pitch and a handshake, you know, you would
(28:46):
just kind of collaborate with whoever song it was. It
was a wide open business and it was also you
know on the filmmaking end, it was like the ultimate
film school. Mixing fully comprehend the impact the song and
video had at until fans started approaching him. Yeah, some
men would come up to him at the mall and
ask him to touch and critique their ladies asses, which
(29:07):
sort of mortifies Mixed today. But many black women praised
him for putting them in the spotlight for loudly and
proudly expressing his love and appreciation of the black female form.
Some even asked him for his autograph on their asses.
And then black women started to walk up and say
thank you. That part probably hit me more than anything
(29:29):
else on the on a grand scale, just from city
to city to city, and I'm talking about little kids,
and I'm talking about twenty year old girls talking about
year old women saying thank you about time. You know,
we knew the brothers like this, but they wouldn't say
it publicly. Yeah, not everyone loved the video. One critic
from New Jersey said, Mixed like a six ft piece
(29:51):
of ship jumping around on a big yellow ass. Meanwhile,
some listeners considered it exploitative, sexist, and racist. Yes, that
fortunate MESA horny sample lifted from the movie Full Metal Jacket.
Picketers protesting several of the mixes shows kind of bumped
them out, But the biggest blowcane when MTV very quickly
(30:12):
decided it couldn't air the video at all. Patty Galouzy
was in her late twenties and serving as the senior
vice president of Music and Talent at MTV, where she
worked from Along with her team, she was responsible for
deciding which videos could air on MTV and which could not.
They based their decisions on guidelines issued by the Networks
(30:35):
Standards and Practices Department, which deemed certain content vulgar, offensive,
or dangerous, mostly to children. Because the press had accused
MTV of warping the minds of the youth, Standards and
Practices was on highland, plenty of hip hop videos would
get lost in a sort of bureaucratic purgatory as a
(30:56):
department evaluated images and passed through lyrics to try to
enter her pret them. In the past, it had refused
air songs like n W A straight out of Compton,
which had said promoted violence. Gluesy wasn't personally offended by
Baby Got Back, nor did she glean a deeper political
message from it. She also doesn't like to say MTV
band maybe got Back. She and her committee actually found
(31:18):
it hilarious and loved it. But in addition to violence, nudity,
and profanity, depictions of the female form were under intense
scrutiny at the time. They knew a song solely about
booty worship with a video featuring countless close ups of
talking asses was dead on arrival. Here's how Bluesy explained it.
There was specifically a rule that there should not be
(31:42):
shots of women's body parts without there being a full
face head attached to that shot of the woman. They
didn't want women to have there to be shots of
just boobs, ass legs, things that would sexualize a woman.
(32:07):
They didn't want shots of those in the music videos
that kids were watching because they felt like that sort
of over sexualized women made women seem like sex objects,
and they felt like, if you add a face two
those body parts, it's less offensive. And when Baby Got
(32:30):
Back came to us, it was an entire video devoted
to a woman's ass. All I could think was, there's
no way it's going to get through standards. Unsurprisingly, Mixed
was gutted when he found out MTV wouldn't air the video.
I thought at that time my career was over. I thought, wow,
(32:53):
he just took just snatched the hit right from my
hands and killed it. The rapper. Remember his voice, his
frustration and dismayed the Heidi Ellen Robinson, the publicists for
Deaf American, which later became American Recordings. Her response still
resonates with him today. Remember ex halee, well, Mix, you're
(33:15):
now Elvis Presley and you shook your leg one too
many times on the Ed Sullivan Show. I will never, ever,
ever in my life forget that because I realized, oh Ship,
I'm the forbidden fruit and that never dies. Still Mix.
Rick Ruben and the promotions and publicity department behind mc
(33:37):
daddy knew that to maximize the exposure and success Toby
they got back, they needed more than radio play. Ruben
even went so far as to have engraved plaques made
the read call MTV regarding Mix a lot that he
left on all his staff members desks. Together, the team
devised a plan, one that involved a surprise meeting with Gluesy.
(33:58):
Glozy was in Seattle to speak radio convention. She worked
in radio before going to EMPTV. When she arrived, she
expected to reunite with people from the industry, but she
didn't know anyone. Her first night there, she stayed in
her hotel room and or a room service. The next day,
after she did her panel, folks signed up to talk
to her, including the record executive Benny Medina, who was
at Warner Brothers at the time. Medina would later manage
(34:21):
the likes of j Lo, Mariah Carey, p Diddy, Usher,
and Tire Banks. The fresh Prince of bel Air was
loosely based on his life. Medina invited Louesy to dinner
that night. She was thrilled she found a friend, so
she accepted the offer. When she arrived at a restaurant,
Medina was seated at a table for four next to
Ricardo Fraser and an empty chair. We were, you know,
(34:45):
doing our introductions and our nice cities, and then someone
comes in to sit in the empty seat and it
was sir mix a Lot and um I just immediately thought,
oh no, I've been ambushed. I'm going to spend this
entire dinner just you know, being gelled at, or you know,
(35:11):
having to put up with hostile questioning about that video
that we can't play, and this is going to suck.
Galuzi explained that her hands were tied, that standards and
practices would never sign off on a video that reduced
women to their sexual body parts, that they needed to
be portrayed as human beings. Mix had his counter argument prepared.
(35:35):
He calmly replied that he had written this song in
response to the delusion images in the media that defined
female beauty using a single archetype, the white, thin women
as seen in the pages of Cosmo. This type of
beauty was unachievable, he said, in particular for many African
American women, but actually for most women period. That resonated
(35:58):
to me. I mean, first of all, I personally with
someone who would never be able to achieve that, you know,
standard of beauty. I mean I could starve myself completely
and never get there, and um and it just it
just made perfect sense to me. Yeah, this is ridiculous.
(36:18):
It's true. The standard for beauty nowadays is that you
have to be almost anorexic, and that's crazy. Mix it
convinced Gluesy. But now Gluzy had to convince her boss,
the president of MTV, Judy McGrath. She arranged to meet
with her back in New York. McGrath listened to Gluzy's perspective,
Mix's perspective and the argument landed with her too. But
(36:42):
it wasn't a done deal. To pacify standards and practices,
Bernstein and his posse had to clean up the video.
Some of its ask shots were replaced with the dancers faces,
others were removed entirely. MTV then agreed to play the
video after nine pm when children were us I Baby
see It. As expected, the glow of the MTV lane
(37:08):
light only boosted the songs growing popularity. Rick Rubin had
predicted The Baby Got Back would be massive, and he
was right. Love It or Loaded. The song was omnipresent,
blowing up the airwaves and soaring up the Billboard Hot
one hundred, where it eventually said It's Big, Fat Juicy
took us and the number one spot for five consecutive weeks,
(37:30):
selling two million copies. It became certified double platinum. As
Patty Gluesy puts it, MTV needed Baby Got Back as
much as it needed MTV. Seeing the round things in
her face, she and the rest of the network got
sprung and new viewers would get sprung to you know,
part of the thing for us at MTV, which we
(37:52):
just wanted to play stuff that we thought was great
programming and also stuff that would make people desperately want
to be watching MTV hoping that their favorite video would
come on. And you know, Baby Got Back was one
of those kinds of videos. We're getting his video played
and MTV and airwaves all over the country was a
(38:12):
huge key to his success. Mixes team knew they would
also need to promote Baby Got Back and Mac Daddy
through more inventive ways. Next up, after the break, we
dig into the other key to the rapper success, a gigantic,
eye popping inflatable ass that descended upon America, crossing land
and sea, and even making its way onto the silver screen.
(38:40):
Of course, radio and video play were only two pieces
of the puzzle. For some mix a lot, there was
another large, okay huge actually piece under normal circumstances, mixed
with tour doing concerts and radio shows to promote Baby
Got Back in his new album, The Trouble was mixed
in Like to Fly. This limited the number of places
(39:01):
the rapper could travel to, so his publicity team needed
a solution. Instead of him dropping by certain cities, a
thirty foot tall, lifelike inflatable brown ass with the words
Sir Mix a Lot plastered on each cheek would descend
upon targets out the country. This giant balloon ASS made
(39:23):
its debut a top rough Trade Records on Hate Street
in San Francisco at the Gavin Convention, a watershed event
held in February to promote up and coming hip hop artists.
In attendance were acts like the young duo Crisscross in
Atlanta Collective arrested Development. As Dan Turnis writes in his
book The Big Payback, The History of the Business of
(39:45):
Hip Hop, these acts, along with Mix and that Ass,
represented a turning point music hip hop was crossing over
and becoming pop. The Assat perched upon its first throne
for five days before moving on to its next destination.
So the balloon went from city to city to city.
(40:06):
It was gawked at wherever it was. I'm sure there
were people who loved it. I'm sure there are people
who hated it because it was damn near pornographic. It
was naked. It's a naked big butt. Marcada was the
general manager and had of promotion at Deaf American American
Recordings from seven. But during the promo cycle for Baby
(40:27):
Got Back, he became the quote unquote but guy, the
man responsible from making sure that mammoth inflatable ass made
its way across America. Here's how he described working with it.
It made appearances around the city. Uh, and then we
put it, you know, in fed X the bag, and
we sent it to the next city. And it kind
(40:49):
of caught on and everyone started calling and saying, when
could we have the butt? We want the butt? Can
you send us the butt by next weekend? Oh? I
needed the weekend after so it became such a thing
that I had to make an other one. Eventually, the
giant ass landed on Broadway on Times Square. Where did
he attempt to expose it to some of music's key tastemakers.
I brabed the security guard at at at the building
(41:12):
there to have the inflatable blown up in the lobby
of MTV. The ceiling was too short, so it kind
of blew up left to right instead of top to
bottom when they when they inflated it, so when the
doors opened, you couldn't get at out of the elevator. Okay,
that incident caused quite a stirt, But the ass would
suffer a much graver fate than being a little bit
(41:33):
crammed at MTV headquarters. For certain unruly or spectators, it
was an easy target. People tried to assassinate the butts.
They were people who shot at it. There were people
who shot arrows into it, bullets, you know. One fateful
day during which someone literally pulled the butt plug. The balloon,
(41:53):
freshly modern at the top the Tempo Record Store on
the corner of Sunset Boulevard and LaBrea Avenue in Hollywood,
was rudely deflated, tongue placed firmly in cheap American recordings.
Publishist Heidi Ellen Robinson decided to lean in. Initual press release,
it read a Tempo store employee reports noticing that the
(42:15):
bub balloon was not visible on the roof when he
reported the work Sunday evening. Upon investigation, he found an enormous,
crippled lump of latex rubber deflated on the roof. Apparently
the criminal element climbed up onto the roof in broad
daylight and then literally pulled the plug. What transpired then
must have been a horrifying site. Luckily, the bub balloon
(42:42):
was reinflated and remounted on the Tempo roof and the
press release. Rick Rubin said he posted a reward for
anyone with information leading to the capture and conviction of
the butt assassinator, adding there are some real sick people
in this world. But the U had plenty of moments
in the spotlight as well. It even graced the big
(43:04):
screen making a cameo and Joel Schumacher's film Falling Down,
a drama in which have fed up every man played
by Michael Douglas has a psychotic breakdown and he gets
violently lashing out of the world rearing its head. In
the backdrop of one scene, the ASS represented the world
going to uh ship. Sorry, I don't want to note
(43:26):
unless you got pounds. On of its many adventures, some
more dangerous than others. The Ass's finest moment may have
been in Malibu during a convention where radio and records
big wigs would turn up and watch bands play and party.
Toda's plan was to get it blown up on the
beach in Santa Monica and put a bikini on it,
(43:47):
you know, so it wasn't naked. Afraid it would offend
some of the women in attendance. The conventions organizers wouldn't
allow it, but to d it would stop at nothing
like he had to do when he learned mixed wouldn't fly,
he got creative. We wouldn't take no for an answer.
I hired a very very very loud UH boat with
(44:08):
a deck in the back of the boat with two
huge speakers, and I had the boat during the party
like kind of blow up near the coast and spread
everyone with water and then go out about turn around,
start playing a song. Baby got back through the speakers
and then inflatable, but blew up and it just sat
out there. Because you know, the the UH, the guys
(44:31):
that were running the convention, we're losing their minds, are like, you, motherfucker,
I told you you couldn't have it on the beach.
I'm like, it's not on the beach, it's out in
the ocean. You can't can't tell me what to do there.
Because he was helping promote mixes new music, Dan Charnis
was on the butt boat. The way he recounts it,
the stuff was both the high and low point in
his career. I have a memory of this moment of
(44:52):
being on this boat in the middle of the bay
in the Santa Monica Bay. Uh just um, like I
had no food, you know, But I think in retrospect,
of course it's I guess. My feeling then was like,
you know this Baby Got Back. This is not what
I got into the business to do. Um, but it
(45:15):
was for me. It was my first taste of what
the hit record was. Baby Got Back wasn't just a
hit record. Not only did this song have backed, it
had legs. Do you know anyone who doesn't know this
song who can't recite at least hath its lyrics on
the spot? You could say it's part of the pop
culture fabric, but the fabric game big enough to contain it.
(45:39):
Its legacy spills out. Think of all its appearances in
film Charlie's Angels, Truck, on television, Friends, Sarah Palin belting
it out while dressed as a bear on the Massive Singer,
and in commercials or Your King not want to mix
(46:01):
his favorite endorsement by the way. Think of the parodies
in Living Colors, Jamie Foxx performing Baby Got Snacks as
trail mix a lot, and my favorite, the amazing video
compilation Baby Got Back Sung by the Movies, and which
different movie scenes are spliced together, so the characters like
Chucky the Terminator, Darth Theader, and Pete Herman say all
(46:23):
the words along to the song. Think about the throne
on which the female booty, not just the black female booty,
but the female booty in general, remains perched today Without
Baby Got Back? Would we have Destiny's Child's Bootylicious j
Low's ensured Assets, The Kardashians, Megan Trainers all about that Bass,
(46:47):
Megany Stallion Party, b lizz Owen or Emmy winning reality
series Watch Out for the Big Girls, Normandy singing about
bacon a cake in her two tho single wild Side,
Chloe Bailey singing about her big booty and her recent
song Have Mercy. Okay, maybe we'd have some of them,
but we certainly wouldn't have. Nicki minaj Is two thousand
(47:08):
fourteen single Anaconda, which sampled and flipped the script on
Baby Got Back with Manage, creating an ass empowerment anthem
from the woman's perspective. When asked about that song, Mix declared,
manage ease Baby Got Back, which was always about applauding
and owning your abundant backside. Now so many women recognize
(47:32):
that the ass is not something to hide, it's a
weapon to be wielded. One of the mixes fondest memories
of performing Baby Got Back occurred in June two thousand
and fourteen. The Seattle Symphony's Sonic Evolution, a concert showcasing
young composers presenting original music inspired by pop culture, included
a piece by Gabriel Prokofiev called Dial Mix a Lot
(47:57):
a reference to a line, and Baby Got Back. After
the piece, Mix was invited to perform an orchestral rendition
of Posse on Broadway, and then at ten minute rendition
of Baby Got Back. During the latter, some forty smartly
dressed women, many of whom were white, rushed the stage
to shake their asses. Please go find this on YouTube.
You will not be disappointed. Well, the video of that
(48:20):
performance went viral. Not everyone in the class of community
was impressed. The gambling community, however, was pretty ecstatic when
the Seminal Hard Rock Hotel and Casino at Hollywood, Florida,
unveils its I like Big Bucks slot machines in as
Dowdy On Bay writes in his two thousand twenty book
Emerald Street, The History of Hip Hop and Seattle, quote.
(48:44):
The immovable, staying power of the message and continued relevance
of this song some thirty years after its release suggest
Baby Got Back may not only have had the greatest
impact on modern culture of any rap song, but perhaps
any other song and any other genre period. That may
sound like hyperbole, but when asked what they think the
(49:05):
legacy of the song is, those involved in its creation, promotion,
and meteoric rise all seemed to agree. There was never
anything like Baby Got Back and there will never be
anything like it again. Adam Bernstein, director of the Baby
(49:30):
Got Back video. You know, I think the legacy on
one level, it's it's like you're you're taking his message
about inclusivity in the way beauty is defined, and you're
mixing that with entertainment, and it was just kind of
like a perfect storm. Mark Didilla, former general manager and
head of promotion Deaf American American Recordings a K. The
(49:54):
Keeper of the Inflatable Glass. I can imagine trying to
put a record like that out right now. The would
be canceled before I made it to the post office.
Dan Charnis, former vice president of A and R Deaf
American American Recordings. I remember many years later, my son
at age three year age four watching Shrek, and at
(50:16):
the end of Shrek, you know the Donkey character, you know,
the character that Eddie Murphy plays or voices, you know,
starts singing Baby Got Back. And so my son at
age four, age five is singing this song. And you know,
kids his age know that song. The greatest legacy of
Baby Got Back is the change in culture. Patty Gluzy,
(50:40):
MTV's former senior vice president of Music and Talent, had
a similar experience when she found herself watching an episode
of Friends with her young daughter years after the song's release.
In it, Ross made his baby laugh for the first
time by singing Baby Got Back to her, and I thought, wow,
you know, if that hadn't happened, if I hadn't had
at dinner with Mix, you know, if I hadn't been
(51:02):
able to go to bat, if Judy McGrath hadn't been
able to say I agree, I'm with you, let's go
back to standards and push this through, then you know,
it would not have been such a big part of
our culture. It would not have been on Friends. I mean,
(51:22):
I definitely think it was the first first instance of
there being something in pop culture that put forth a
body positivity message. And when he wrote this song, was
he thinking about body positivity for young women? I don't know,
(51:44):
but it is true that it is the first, the
very first, you know, instance that I can think of
that really celebrates that beauty comes in all kinds of
shapes and sizes, and you know, it's fantastic for that.
Asks her mix a lot, and he'll tell you his
one little songs. Big impact extends beyond Booty Pride. He
(52:07):
says that helped shift black female representation in the media
as a whole. The legacy of Baby Got Back would
probably be that it changed something that needed changing, but
from a shallow viewpoint. My viewpoint was shallow intentionally because
we weren't. You didn't see black female lawyers, you didn't
see black female accountants, you didn't see any of that.
(52:30):
But it's because everything else that came with them was
considered abnormal. That's kind of what Baby Got Back was.
It was basically trying to normalize African American beauty and
then hopefully more would come, and it did. It did
Baby Got Backs. Iconic ample booty video star Almond agrees,
I'm glad I did it. Because this thing like after that,
(52:52):
everybody jumped on the behind bandwag. It made history. It's history, baby,
and I'm part of that history. I was the first
one and it can never be taken from me on him.
(53:24):
Where Were You in ninety two was a production of
I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Noel Brown and
Jordan run Talk. The show was researched, written and hosted
by me Jason Lafier, with editing and sound design by
Michael Alder June. If you like what you heard, please
subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, check out the I Heart Radio app,
(53:46):
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Where Were You In ninety two is a production of
I Heart Radio. Oh my God, Becky look at her.
But it may be one of the most unforgettable opening
lines of a song in the history of popular music.
Say those words and they instantly conjure images of rump
(00:23):
shaking models, a pair of very annoying valley girls, a
man hanging out in the crack of an enormous gold
ass Carsopolitan magazine, Jane Fonda, Ross and Rachel's Baby, ond Friends,
Burger King, Shrek, Nicki Minaj, Red Beans, and Rice, high
school dances about Mitzvah's, Kegger's, karaoke, birthday parties, sports games,
(00:49):
wedding receptions, okay, basically anything but funerals. The impact of
Sir mix a Lot's Baby Got Back was massive, Its
legacy refutable and eternal. The song was big, thick and
juicy then and it will forever be big, thick and juicy. Well,
they auditioned every and I gotta say every light scanned
(01:12):
girl out here in Los Angeles, because you remember that's
what they were doing it. They're very you know, they
can be colorous like that. That's Almond, the first black
woman you see in the music video for Baby Got Back.
She's the gorgeous ample booty goddess slowly spinning around on
a platform towering above white Bucky and her nasty judge
white friend, posing in a tight fitting yellow dress, all
(01:34):
saltry and his Almond puts it sinewy, cast in the
glow of the spotlight against an endless pink and purple sky.
Like so many curvy women of color in Almon didn't
see much of herself on TV and films or music videos.
Like she said, many women like her were even getting auditions.
By the way, yes, Almond does go by just her
(01:55):
first name. She's earned it. So Max had already told
them what he was looking for, right, So they still
sent them the light span girls, you know, kind of
straight up and down, that type of girl, right, And
then he said he had to have a meeting. He said,
this is not what I'm looking for. I told you
guys what I was looking for. My agent didn't even
submit me. It was somebody working with her saw my
(02:17):
picture and submitted me, sent me on the audition. I
was a very last person to auditions when Sir mix
a lot unleashed Baby Got Back in May of the
rapper had no idea to hit he had in his hands.
That hit would go on to spend five weeks at
number one on the Billboard Hot one Singles chart and
become the second best selling single of that year after
(02:40):
Wait for It Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You. Yep.
Right behind the theme from the Bodyguard was the theme
from the Booty Guard. The man who cherished and wished
to protect large asses at all costs. Nix would have
taken a bullet for one of these bubbly beautiful backsides,
but he wouldn't pull a gun on someone over one. Okay,
(03:02):
more on that later. But if it became a whopping success,
some listeners didn't know what to make of Baby Got Back?
Was it just a fleeting, frivolous novelty song, yet another
example of a male hip hop artist objectifying women, a
celebration of the real life voluptuous black female form and
therefore an honest to goodness body positive feminist anthem. My answer,
(03:27):
I think Sir ms Lot was having his cake and
eating it too, but he'd be the first to admit it.
And regardless of what you thought or think of Baby
Got Back, You other brothers and sisters and humans can't
deny that there had never been, nor will there ever
be again, a song fight like it. Welcome to Where
(03:55):
Were You In ninety two? A podcast in which I
your host Jason Lampier, look back at the major hits,
one hit wonders, shocking news stories, and irresistible scandals that
shaped what might be the wildest, most eclectic, most controversial
twelve months of music ever. It was the year of
big butt anthems and he breaking hearts and Madonna's sex books.
(04:18):
It was Yere the Boys to Men and Whitney Houston
shattered Billboard chart records, while George Michael, YouTube and TLC
confronted the AIDS crisis had on. It was the year
that introduced us to grunge, g funk, and write said Fred.
Featuring interviews with critics, obsessives, industry big wigs, directors, producers,
and the artists themselves, this series poses the question, what
(04:42):
was it about that made it so groundbreaking, so riotous,
so fun and so that ship crazy. This week we
look back at Sir mix a Lot's huge hit and
as far as the charts were concerned, only hit Baby
Got That and induct us owe to the Black Female
booty that took America by storm, arriving with an innuendo
(05:05):
pack video that Empty v initially rejected because of its
racy visuals. Yet the song not only helped spark the
body positivity movement two decades before it became the creed
occur of women all over the country, it also provided
a fresh, more dimensional and necessary representation of black women
to its audiences. How and why did this hip hop
(05:26):
classic leave such a vast pop cultural imprint, Why does
its legacy still loom so large today? To answer those questions,
we first have to look at the man behind this
undeniable tribute to behind Anthony ray A k A Sir
mix a lot his dowdy Abe explains, and It's two
(05:48):
thousand twenty book Emerald Street, A History of Hip Hop
and Seattle Nasty Mixed Records was a surprising success story
given that hip hop was primarily coming out of New
York City at the time. Seattle wasn't even on most
hip hop band's radars. Unlike grunge, which became synonymous with Seattle,
no quintessential Seattle hip hop sound existed. That notion was
(06:10):
practically laughable. Yet here was mix releasing two albums in
the late nineteen eighties, Swaz and Seminar that eventually want Platinum.
Mix grew up in the city Central District, and when
he had no musical training, he was a big fan
of the German electronic music pioneers craft Work, and he
became adept at using not only turntables, but machines and
equipment like the Rolling eight away drum machine, corgan Mode synthesizers,
(06:33):
and the Commodore sixty four computer to create tracks in
his apartment. He was also heavily influenced by the Emerald
Street Boys. The first hip hop artist to break out
in Seattle, Mix first made a name for himself performing
at weekend parties the Boys and Girls Club in the
(06:55):
Central District. For one dollar, guests could hang out in
the gym and listen to him scratch records, splay samples
together and wrapped in nasty res. Roderiguez, the host of
K fox's Fresh Tracks, the first popular rap radio show
in Seattle, went to one of Mixes sets. Impressed by
his virtuosity, Roderiguez invited Mix to play his music on
(07:17):
k Fox, where he eventually became the most requested artists
over the likes of Prince and Michael Jackson. Soon after,
the pair combined their names to launch Nasty Mix Records
along with their partners Outlock and Greg Jones. After putting
out a couple of vps, Mixed under reputation outside Seattle
for his single Square Dance Rap, which in Night six
(07:39):
landed him an invitation to England's first ever hip hop festival,
fresh Fest UK, where he performed with acts like Africa
Mambada and Grandmaster Flash in The Furious Five. A year later,
he released Posse on Broadway, a tribute to his home city,
partially inspired by the Beastie Boys Paul Revere and which
Mix shouted out Seattle landmarks like Renar Avenue and the
(08:00):
local burger chain dick S Drive. In It's video ran
on MTV, and the song peaked at number seventy on
the Boboard Hot one chart. Posse on Broadway was a
bit of a hip hop arty. While peers like n
w A referred to women as bitches and Hose Mix
shutdown dismissive and violent behavior towards women. The cuts lyrics
(08:21):
were counting how he maced a man he saw about
to beat his girlfriend, where so much of hip hop
at the time was filled with rage, annie police rhetoric,
and accounts of growing up marginalized in poor. Mix infuses
songs on his debut album Swas with humor and positivity,
detailing his aspirations to get rich, get famous, and get lucky.
(08:42):
Swaz became the biggest selling album from an Indecattlebles label
in years. It mixes second album, Seminar, had its more
playful moments. For example, the song my Hoopeddie was about
the rapper chugging along and a conker well his Mercedes
Benz was a repair shop. It was more socially consciousnes
(09:04):
Swaws The Peek a Boo Game, for example, addressed team pregnancy,
the sex trade, and sexual abuse. Meanwhile, National Anthem was
a critique of extreme patriotism in America's foreign policy. Mix's
ambition paid off. He scored interviews with the already popular
yomtd Raps and the t S Rap City, and, like
(09:25):
its predecessor, Seminar one platinum, selling more than a million copies.
But if Mix was achieving a new level of stardom
on his own terms, things were hardly perfect, and they
were about to change drastically. While Mix was still green.
He knew he wasn't happy with the promotion of Seminar.
Taking cues from his one time tourmate public enemies Chuck d,
(09:46):
he decided to stand up for himself. He tapped Ricardo Fraser,
a precocious internal Nasty Mix, to be his manager. Fun
Fact Fraser reps Mixed to this day. Sminar marked the
end of Mixes contract with Nasty Mix, who at that
point ode mixed north of three hundred thousand dollars. He
and the label went to court, and after spending a
(10:06):
boatload of cash, Mix ultimately got his old masters. Nasty
Mix shuttered in and Mix was free to secure a
new label. When asked today, Mix says he has no
animosity toward an est Mix. Yeah. Despite losing a ton
of money, Mix found himself on the market at an
opportune time. Hip hop at least a tame or less angry,
(10:29):
more accessible okay meaning more accessible to white listeners. Strain
of hip hop was building. Scheme. MC Hammer had become
the first hip hop artist to achieve Diamonds status with
his ninety nine album Please Hammer Don't Hurt Him, featuring
the huge hit you Can't Touch This Meanwhile, Vanilla Ices
Smash Ice Ice Baby had reached number one and gone platinum.
(10:49):
Enter Rick Reuben, after leaving Deaf Jam Records, the label
he founded with the russell Simpons have propelled the careers
of hip hop titans like the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J,
Public Enemy and run d ms See. The producer Mastermind,
had just founded Deaf American Records. He gave Mix his
own death label, Ryan Cartel Records. Ricardo Fraser would serve
(11:10):
as president and Mix would be CEO. Mix's first release
on the label was his third album, Mac Daddy, the
record that contained the single that would catapult Mix his
own career. Sir Maxilla had written about social issues facing
(11:34):
women before, but a new song he was working on,
Baby Got Back, was personal. He'd been dating an aspiring
actress and model, Amalia Dorsey Rivas, who was struggling to
find work because of her size, particularly the size of
her backside. She was half black, half Mexican, and curvy.
One night, when the couple was watching his Super Bowl
(11:55):
in a hotel room during one of Mixes tours, they
saw a spud Mackenzie Budweiser ad. The models in it
were sticks in including the soul black model in it.
If Mix was shocked and incensed, I'm only it wasn't
at all. She got it, as she said in a
two thousand thirteen Vulture interview, where I grew up in
(12:16):
the suburbs of Seattle. If you weren't built like Paris Hilton,
you weren't appreciated. I worked at a modeling agency as
a teenager, and I taught hair, makeup and runway classes
to six ft tall girls who ate ninety pounds. But
I didn't get much work, and neither did anyone who
looked like me. This piste mix off. In fact, a
lack of adequate and accurate representation of black women in
(12:38):
the media period pissed him off. In his mind, Hollywood
in the music industry had been under serving these women
for decades. The early nineties were no different. I trapped
down Sir Mix a lot to talk about his inspiration
for the song. If you go back to that era,
there were two types of African American women that succeeded
in Hollywood. Basically, you either had to assimilate to white
(13:01):
culture or you were the underestimated made that worked for
a white family and they would advise the children on
what to do correctly because mom just didn't get it,
or you'd be the street wise hooker on an episode
of Law and Order. Um and and that was it.
Mix couldn't stand seeing black women consistently reduced to stereotypes,
(13:23):
nor did he agree with the standards of beauty the
magazines like Cosmopolitan or propagating. To him, the rails and
women on those pages were neither realistic nor attractive. He
thought women with curves were sexy, and knew plenty of
other black men did too, Yet women with hourglass figures
were nowhere to be found in the hip hop and
R and B videos he was seeing. His outrage incited
(13:45):
him to write a hard hitting track protesting the absence
of real black women in the media. But as the
song came together, Mixed realized its lyrics were actually pretty funny.
Maybe he thought he should lean into the humor. Of course,
anyone who's heard Baby Got Back knows that it's the
humor that sells it. Floating effortlessly over a beat sampled
(14:07):
from Channel one early Detroit technosong technocolor Mixes Versus managed
to be both ridiculous and sublime, even if it teeters
on the edge of sounding like a commercial jingle. It's
rhymes are clever, hooky, and just weird enough to leave
an impression. Oh rump of smooth skin, you say you
(14:29):
want to get in my bends? Will use me? Use
me because you ain't that average groupie. Okay. Notice here
how Mixed subverts a classic fairy tale and takes the
submissive role. Okay, that's clever. Shake that healthy butt. Okay.
If that ain't body positive, then I don't know what is.
(14:51):
I'll keep my women like flow Joe Okay, who in
Hip Hop in two name checked Olympic gold medal winning
track and field athletes in their mus Rick Ruben Genius
city Is had already pushed Mix to make Baby Got
Back mar Bat, and he had another clever idea. When
Mix delivered a punchline, the music would fade out to
(15:12):
really accentuate it in case, for example, my Anaconda don't
want none unless you got buttons on. But the most
brilliant artistic choice and twist was Mixed and listing none
other than his girlfriend Emilia Dorsey revas to voice that
Caddy Valley girl talking to Becky at the beginning of
(15:34):
the song Dorsey Revas was adopted and had grown up
with various foster kids and picked up a ton of accents.
A half black woman mocking the voice of a white
woman mocking a black woman on her figure in a
number one hit single that's going to be one of
the most amazing funk cues and pop music history. Still,
(16:00):
the mix was pleased with the results. He never planned
to release Baby Got Back as a single. Dan Charnes
as an author and professor of music history and Writing
at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the
Tische School of the Arts in New York University, but
in two he was in Los Angeles working in the
rap department of Rick Ruben's Deaf American Recordings. He eventually
(16:22):
became its vice president of A and R. But after
Reuben signed Mixed Turance was tasked with choosing the first
single from his upcoming third album, The Problem. Turnus was
not a fantom mixes music compared to the hip hop
artist he had been promoting back in New York, like
Brundy M. C special Ed and Rob Bates, he thought
mixes stuff sounded unremarkable and derivative, and particularly too similar
(16:46):
to the Beastio Boys. When he sat down to listen
to a cassette of Mix's new material, he thought the
first two tracks were just fine, and then the third song,
I think was this song that began, Oh my god, Becky,
look at her butt right in this whole song unfolds
(17:06):
right and yeah, it's funny, you know, like I like
big butts and I cannot lie. But as the lyrics,
you know, as the sort of the verses are are
spooling out, I'm I'm realizing that this is actually a
political song. Right. That's churnis we're calling to me. The
moment he knew Mixed wasn't just waxing horny. He was
(17:28):
tapping into the zeitgeist. He was onto something. That's funny
because Amery Baraka's daughter, Lisa Jones wrote an essay for
The Village Voice a few weeks before I got that
cassette called Venus Envy, in which she talked about how
the white beauty aesthetic of very very rail, thin women, tall, pale,
(17:55):
very few curves, how that was starting to be over
own and subverted essentially by black popular culture and by
artists like Janet Jackson, by the appearance of models like, um,
I think her name was Beverly Peel. So Lisa Jones,
she was, you know, talking about this this model who
(18:19):
suddenly appeared on the pages of a major women's magazine
with this sort of high booty. As she said right now,
this really wasn't the kind of figure that appeared in
a women's magazine at the time, and she was she
talked about in the same year that Public Enemy had
released an album called Fear of a Black Planet. Lisa
(18:41):
Jones was talking about, you know, lifting the fear of
a big black butt essentially, and so there was a
feeling that culture was changing, and that culture was changing
in part because of music and in particular hip hop.
And in that moment, to me, I became a mix
a lot fan because this was sort of a rallying cry,
(19:04):
right like, oh my god, mix lots of feminists, you know,
in my year old mind. Charnis was electrified by the song.
It marked the beginning of him starting to let go
of some of his East Coast hip hop snobbery. He
called Reuben and told him they had to make Baby
Got Back the first single form mcdaddy. Reuben agreed, mixed
(19:27):
and not he really wanted the first single to be
One Time's Got No Case, a tougher, more serious track
about racial profiling that sampled Stevie wonders, you haven't done nothing,
he feared Baby Got Back sounded to jokey. After some debate,
Mixed got his way. One time He's Got No Case
was released as the first single. I put it out,
(19:49):
great video, but it flocked. He said it would, and
all right, his towel between his legs, Mixed agreed to
put out Baby Got Back his mac daddy's next single
and video. Little did he know that the decision would
change his life forever. Next up, after the break, we
dive into the bonker story behind the Baby Got Back video,
(20:11):
from Mixes Creative Demand's final ASTs approval for its dancers,
to the creative tension over its crazy concept, to MTVS
refusal to air it because if it's offensive content also
was or wasn't a gun pulled out set Producer Rick
(20:38):
Ruben new Baby Got Back to be massive, so to
execute his vision for the video, he was going to
need the right director, someone who could drive Mix his
message home, but also serve up the right visual nods
and winks to reflect the songs. Sauciness and match it's
point production. Reuben was a big fan of Adam Bernstein,
who had created eccentric cooking videos for All Rock Goofballs.
(21:01):
They might be Giants and the Beastie Boys, but it
was best known for directing the video for the BF
two smash Love Shack. I had been approached earlier to
do the Big Old Button, and I was like, Oh,
I don't know if I want to do a body
part video, you know what I mean, like the women
that you know, like my production company was owned by
two women. I didn't. I was very I was concerned about,
(21:25):
you know, objectifying and stuff like that. That's Adam Bernstein
telling me about his initial reservations about taking on Baby
Got Back. However, after really listening to the song, he
realized it wasn't just about objectification. It was a celebration
and like really really funny. It wasn't just someone you know,
(21:45):
saying I like big butts, although he does say in
the song he likes big butts, but it was it
was about like what what the mainstream kind of norms
of beauty were for the culture, and like what was
beautiful to him? So you know, and what was beautiful
and black culture. Bernstein met with Mixed to discuss the
concept for the video. As he tells it, Mix and
(22:07):
envisioned himself emerging from an enormous ass. Okay, Fortunately Bernstein
dissuaded him from doing that, but mixes adamant about maintaining
a certain level of creating control. One of Mix's biggest
stipulations was that he wanted to sign off on all
the model dancers cast in the video, specifically on their asses,
(22:31):
and Mix wanted personal approval over the booty. He wanted
personal personal approval over all the butts. So I was
in the kind of, like slightly a funny position of
having to ask all these beautiful dancers if I could
take a polar rate of their butt, and most of
them thought it was pretty funny. And then we we
(22:52):
made a select and we sent this. We made a
kind of this is before why do you say? The Internet?
And we made kind of like a giant grid of
all the butts, and we fed exit up to Seattle
for Mixed to approve. Okay, I'm picturing Carrie Matheson on
Homeland with her crazy wall of clues and leads, except
(23:15):
this time it's a bunch of Spandex covered asses For
her part. Almond says she wasn't bothered at all by
Bernstein asking to take a picture of her butt. She
was there as she told me to work. Incidentally, you
can see the snapshot of her butt flash across the
screen and the music video. Burnstein and enlisted Dana Hollister,
(23:38):
the costume designer with whom he worked on the Beastie Boys,
Hey Ladies video. Tasked with dressing the dancers was only
a five budget. She got scrappy making gold shorts and
banana skirts the ladder, which she herself covered and glittered. Meanwhile,
inspired by the booty positive work of the photographer Jean
Paul Good, who also inspired that two thousand fourteen Kim
(23:59):
car to Ash, she embraked the internet, paper and magazine cover.
Bernstein crafted the ass of Mixes Dreams out of fiberglass
and pencil steel, a material used to make aircraft frames.
When Mix showed up to shoot the video at the
Chaplain Studio in Los Angeles, he was stunned and overwhelmed.
He'd never worked with a major label or seen cameras
(24:21):
that big or an ass that big. It was gold, gigantic,
and in his mind gratuitous, and he was scared shitless.
His song with a serious message was becoming like the
literal butt of the joke. It was a big yellow
paper mache looking as right, what day. I didn't know
(24:44):
it was gonna be that big. First of all, that
was like a planet that was not a that was
not a that was a planet that was like Mars,
Like they rolled it in and just I'm looking at
this thing, and I'm like, okay, And I had on
all brown and my guys just, oh my god, said yeah,
you look like a dancing turd, like a piece of
ship on the giants. Mix could live with the colossal ass,
(25:07):
and he could live with the fact that some of
the dancers were cast less for their booties and more
for their actual, you know, like dance skills. What was
non negotiable was some of the dancers. Attiger Mix would
be the first to admit he viewed these women as
sex symbols, but they weren't there for him to dismiss
and ridicule. They were unattainable goddesses he worshiped. I didn't
(25:30):
want to be a hypocrite, right, I've done song, done
songs in the past, saying I want to ask sex
with women all the time, So for me to all
of a sudden go, no, that's really never been me.
That's fake. So what I wanted to do was be me.
But not when when Mix arrived on set, he noticed
one dancer wasn't styled to look like a goddess. To Mix,
(25:52):
she looks trashy. I remember some kind of goofy shorts,
real super tight tigger kind of shorts and neck assist
and it was just really nasty, right, And I'm like,
this is the opposite of what I want. You know,
I don't want her to be hood rat. I don't
want her to be home. I wanted it to be
just fine, that's it. And I want her to be
(26:15):
seen as the norm and let these other chicks come
off as you know, haters. That model dancer was Almond,
the first black woman you see and the baby got
back video. She didn't like the outfit either. Mix came
in and he was like, no, that's what that's what
we don't I don't want that for her. Just so happened.
I had that dress that I auditioned in so that
(26:35):
addresses you see me, and that's the dress I auditioned
in and that's the dress that came out my bag
to give me out them shorts and that half tank top.
If the manager to resolved the issue of Almond styling,
costume designer in a Hollister still wasn't satisfied with Mixes
All Brown ensemble, even as friends on set thought he
looked like ship, like real ship, and a two thirteen
(26:55):
Vulture interview, she said when she pushed back on his look,
Mix pulled a gun on her. How else to follow
that up by saying he's a quote unquote lovely guy.
Bernstein has no recollection of this. Mix denies it ever happened. No,
I've always been at the guns I got I got
(27:15):
a bunch of upstairs right now, But you ain't man.
A black man traveling across state lines in the nineties
during the Gang era to make sure he could defend
himself against a makeup artist. I did get piste, but
I did not call a gun over some shorts. Ultimately,
Mix was happy with how the video turned out. Rather
than undermine it. Bernstein realized Mix's vision and folded in
(27:39):
enough humor dancers and personating Josephine Baker and a cone
bro clad Madonna with another doing kung fu style kicks,
and enough innuendo whips, cracking cute little mini buns, bouncing
on turntables, and an insane dude we get it amount
of fruit to make the video one of the most
memorable of its era. Even Bernstein's female college egs were impressed.
(28:01):
Initially they were like, I just can't believe you did that.
And then after it became this phenomenon and they began
to understand, like what the you know, what the cultural
significance of the video was in terms of beauty norms
and stuff. Then they came around and they liked it.
Bernstein wanted to become a hot shot, any winning TV guy,
directing episodes of basically every series on the planet, including
(28:24):
Breaking Bad, Thirty Rock, Fargo, and Billions, but he finally
remembers those days back when shooting music videos was the
wild West. It was still kind of an industry without
adult supervision, Like there weren't. You would just you would
kind of like just a lot of it was just
like a pitch and a handshake, you know, you would
(28:46):
just kind of collaborate with whoever song it was. It
was a wide open business and it was also you
know on the filmmaking end, it was like the ultimate
film school. Mixing fully comprehend the impact the song and
video had at until fans started approaching him. Yeah, some
men would come up to him at the mall and
ask him to touch and critique their ladies asses, which
(29:07):
sort of mortifies Mixed today. But many black women praised
him for putting them in the spotlight for loudly and
proudly expressing his love and appreciation of the black female form.
Some even asked him for his autograph on their asses.
And then black women started to walk up and say
thank you. That part probably hit me more than anything
(29:29):
else on the on a grand scale, just from city
to city to city, and I'm talking about little kids,
and I'm talking about twenty year old girls talking about
year old women saying thank you about time. You know,
we knew the brothers like this, but they wouldn't say
it publicly. Yeah, not everyone loved the video. One critic
from New Jersey said, Mixed like a six ft piece
(29:51):
of ship jumping around on a big yellow ass. Meanwhile,
some listeners considered it exploitative, sexist, and racist. Yes, that
fortunate MESA horny sample lifted from the movie Full Metal Jacket.
Picketers protesting several of the mixes shows kind of bumped
them out, But the biggest blowcane when MTV very quickly
(30:12):
decided it couldn't air the video at all. Patty Galouzy
was in her late twenties and serving as the senior
vice president of Music and Talent at MTV, where she
worked from Along with her team, she was responsible for
deciding which videos could air on MTV and which could not.
They based their decisions on guidelines issued by the Networks
(30:35):
Standards and Practices Department, which deemed certain content vulgar, offensive,
or dangerous, mostly to children. Because the press had accused
MTV of warping the minds of the youth, Standards and
Practices was on highland, plenty of hip hop videos would
get lost in a sort of bureaucratic purgatory as a
(30:56):
department evaluated images and passed through lyrics to try to
enter her pret them. In the past, it had refused
air songs like n W A straight out of Compton,
which had said promoted violence. Gluesy wasn't personally offended by
Baby Got Back, nor did she glean a deeper political
message from it. She also doesn't like to say MTV
band maybe got Back. She and her committee actually found
(31:18):
it hilarious and loved it. But in addition to violence, nudity,
and profanity, depictions of the female form were under intense
scrutiny at the time. They knew a song solely about
booty worship with a video featuring countless close ups of
talking asses was dead on arrival. Here's how Bluesy explained it.
There was specifically a rule that there should not be
(31:42):
shots of women's body parts without there being a full
face head attached to that shot of the woman. They
didn't want women to have there to be shots of
just boobs, ass legs, things that would sexualize a woman.
(32:07):
They didn't want shots of those in the music videos
that kids were watching because they felt like that sort
of over sexualized women made women seem like sex objects,
and they felt like, if you add a face two
those body parts, it's less offensive. And when Baby Got
(32:30):
Back came to us, it was an entire video devoted
to a woman's ass. All I could think was, there's
no way it's going to get through standards. Unsurprisingly, Mixed
was gutted when he found out MTV wouldn't air the video.
I thought at that time my career was over. I thought, wow,
(32:53):
he just took just snatched the hit right from my
hands and killed it. The rapper. Remember his voice, his
frustration and dismayed the Heidi Ellen Robinson, the publicists for
Deaf American, which later became American Recordings. Her response still
resonates with him today. Remember ex halee, well, Mix, you're
(33:15):
now Elvis Presley and you shook your leg one too
many times on the Ed Sullivan Show. I will never, ever,
ever in my life forget that because I realized, oh Ship,
I'm the forbidden fruit and that never dies. Still Mix.
Rick Ruben and the promotions and publicity department behind mc
(33:37):
daddy knew that to maximize the exposure and success Toby
they got back, they needed more than radio play. Ruben
even went so far as to have engraved plaques made
the read call MTV regarding Mix a lot that he
left on all his staff members desks. Together, the team
devised a plan, one that involved a surprise meeting with Gluesy.
(33:58):
Glozy was in Seattle to speak radio convention. She worked
in radio before going to EMPTV. When she arrived, she
expected to reunite with people from the industry, but she
didn't know anyone. Her first night there, she stayed in
her hotel room and or a room service. The next day,
after she did her panel, folks signed up to talk
to her, including the record executive Benny Medina, who was
at Warner Brothers at the time. Medina would later manage
(34:21):
the likes of j Lo, Mariah Carey, p Diddy, Usher,
and Tire Banks. The fresh Prince of bel Air was
loosely based on his life. Medina invited Louesy to dinner
that night. She was thrilled she found a friend, so
she accepted the offer. When she arrived at a restaurant,
Medina was seated at a table for four next to
Ricardo Fraser and an empty chair. We were, you know,
(34:45):
doing our introductions and our nice cities, and then someone
comes in to sit in the empty seat and it
was sir mix a Lot and um I just immediately thought,
oh no, I've been ambushed. I'm going to spend this
entire dinner just you know, being gelled at, or you know,
(35:11):
having to put up with hostile questioning about that video
that we can't play, and this is going to suck.
Galuzi explained that her hands were tied, that standards and
practices would never sign off on a video that reduced
women to their sexual body parts, that they needed to
be portrayed as human beings. Mix had his counter argument prepared.
(35:35):
He calmly replied that he had written this song in
response to the delusion images in the media that defined
female beauty using a single archetype, the white, thin women
as seen in the pages of Cosmo. This type of
beauty was unachievable, he said, in particular for many African
American women, but actually for most women period. That resonated
(35:58):
to me. I mean, first of all, I personally with
someone who would never be able to achieve that, you know,
standard of beauty. I mean I could starve myself completely
and never get there, and um and it just it
just made perfect sense to me. Yeah, this is ridiculous.
(36:18):
It's true. The standard for beauty nowadays is that you
have to be almost anorexic, and that's crazy. Mix it
convinced Gluesy. But now Gluzy had to convince her boss,
the president of MTV, Judy McGrath. She arranged to meet
with her back in New York. McGrath listened to Gluzy's perspective,
Mix's perspective and the argument landed with her too. But
(36:42):
it wasn't a done deal. To pacify standards and practices,
Bernstein and his posse had to clean up the video.
Some of its ask shots were replaced with the dancers faces,
others were removed entirely. MTV then agreed to play the
video after nine pm when children were us I Baby
see It. As expected, the glow of the MTV lane
(37:08):
light only boosted the songs growing popularity. Rick Rubin had
predicted The Baby Got Back would be massive, and he
was right. Love It or Loaded. The song was omnipresent,
blowing up the airwaves and soaring up the Billboard Hot
one hundred, where it eventually said It's Big, Fat Juicy
took us and the number one spot for five consecutive weeks,
(37:30):
selling two million copies. It became certified double platinum. As
Patty Gluesy puts it, MTV needed Baby Got Back as
much as it needed MTV. Seeing the round things in
her face, she and the rest of the network got
sprung and new viewers would get sprung to you know,
part of the thing for us at MTV, which we
(37:52):
just wanted to play stuff that we thought was great
programming and also stuff that would make people desperately want
to be watching MTV hoping that their favorite video would
come on. And you know, Baby Got Back was one
of those kinds of videos. We're getting his video played
and MTV and airwaves all over the country was a
(38:12):
huge key to his success. Mixes team knew they would
also need to promote Baby Got Back and Mac Daddy
through more inventive ways. Next up, after the break, we
dig into the other key to the rapper success, a gigantic,
eye popping inflatable ass that descended upon America, crossing land
and sea, and even making its way onto the silver screen.
(38:40):
Of course, radio and video play were only two pieces
of the puzzle. For some mix a lot, there was
another large, okay huge actually piece under normal circumstances, mixed
with tour doing concerts and radio shows to promote Baby
Got Back in his new album, The Trouble was mixed
in Like to Fly. This limited the number of places
(39:01):
the rapper could travel to, so his publicity team needed
a solution. Instead of him dropping by certain cities, a
thirty foot tall, lifelike inflatable brown ass with the words
Sir Mix a Lot plastered on each cheek would descend
upon targets out the country. This giant balloon ASS made
(39:23):
its debut a top rough Trade Records on Hate Street
in San Francisco at the Gavin Convention, a watershed event
held in February to promote up and coming hip hop artists.
In attendance were acts like the young duo Crisscross in
Atlanta Collective arrested Development. As Dan Turnis writes in his
book The Big Payback, The History of the Business of
(39:45):
Hip Hop, these acts, along with Mix and that Ass,
represented a turning point music hip hop was crossing over
and becoming pop. The Assat perched upon its first throne
for five days before moving on to its next destination.
So the balloon went from city to city to city.
(40:06):
It was gawked at wherever it was. I'm sure there
were people who loved it. I'm sure there are people
who hated it because it was damn near pornographic. It
was naked. It's a naked big butt. Marcada was the
general manager and had of promotion at Deaf American American
Recordings from seven. But during the promo cycle for Baby
(40:27):
Got Back, he became the quote unquote but guy, the
man responsible from making sure that mammoth inflatable ass made
its way across America. Here's how he described working with it.
It made appearances around the city. Uh, and then we
put it, you know, in fed X the bag, and
we sent it to the next city. And it kind
(40:49):
of caught on and everyone started calling and saying, when
could we have the butt? We want the butt? Can
you send us the butt by next weekend? Oh? I
needed the weekend after so it became such a thing
that I had to make an other one. Eventually, the
giant ass landed on Broadway on Times Square. Where did
he attempt to expose it to some of music's key tastemakers.
I brabed the security guard at at at the building
(41:12):
there to have the inflatable blown up in the lobby
of MTV. The ceiling was too short, so it kind
of blew up left to right instead of top to
bottom when they when they inflated it, so when the
doors opened, you couldn't get at out of the elevator. Okay,
that incident caused quite a stirt, But the ass would
suffer a much graver fate than being a little bit
(41:33):
crammed at MTV headquarters. For certain unruly or spectators, it
was an easy target. People tried to assassinate the butts.
They were people who shot at it. There were people
who shot arrows into it, bullets, you know. One fateful
day during which someone literally pulled the butt plug. The balloon,
(41:53):
freshly modern at the top the Tempo Record Store on
the corner of Sunset Boulevard and LaBrea Avenue in Hollywood,
was rudely deflated, tongue placed firmly in cheap American recordings.
Publishist Heidi Ellen Robinson decided to lean in. Initual press release,
it read a Tempo store employee reports noticing that the
(42:15):
bub balloon was not visible on the roof when he
reported the work Sunday evening. Upon investigation, he found an enormous,
crippled lump of latex rubber deflated on the roof. Apparently
the criminal element climbed up onto the roof in broad
daylight and then literally pulled the plug. What transpired then
must have been a horrifying site. Luckily, the bub balloon
(42:42):
was reinflated and remounted on the Tempo roof and the
press release. Rick Rubin said he posted a reward for
anyone with information leading to the capture and conviction of
the butt assassinator, adding there are some real sick people
in this world. But the U had plenty of moments
in the spotlight as well. It even graced the big
(43:04):
screen making a cameo and Joel Schumacher's film Falling Down,
a drama in which have fed up every man played
by Michael Douglas has a psychotic breakdown and he gets
violently lashing out of the world rearing its head. In
the backdrop of one scene, the ASS represented the world
going to uh ship. Sorry, I don't want to note
(43:26):
unless you got pounds. On of its many adventures, some
more dangerous than others. The Ass's finest moment may have
been in Malibu during a convention where radio and records
big wigs would turn up and watch bands play and party.
Toda's plan was to get it blown up on the
beach in Santa Monica and put a bikini on it,
(43:47):
you know, so it wasn't naked. Afraid it would offend
some of the women in attendance. The conventions organizers wouldn't
allow it, but to d it would stop at nothing
like he had to do when he learned mixed wouldn't fly,
he got creative. We wouldn't take no for an answer.
I hired a very very very loud UH boat with
(44:08):
a deck in the back of the boat with two
huge speakers, and I had the boat during the party
like kind of blow up near the coast and spread
everyone with water and then go out about turn around,
start playing a song. Baby got back through the speakers
and then inflatable, but blew up and it just sat
out there. Because you know, the the UH, the guys
(44:31):
that were running the convention, we're losing their minds, are like, you, motherfucker,
I told you you couldn't have it on the beach.
I'm like, it's not on the beach, it's out in
the ocean. You can't can't tell me what to do there.
Because he was helping promote mixes new music, Dan Charnis
was on the butt boat. The way he recounts it,
the stuff was both the high and low point in
his career. I have a memory of this moment of
(44:52):
being on this boat in the middle of the bay
in the Santa Monica Bay. Uh just um, like I
had no food, you know, But I think in retrospect,
of course it's I guess. My feeling then was like,
you know this Baby Got Back. This is not what
I got into the business to do. Um, but it
(45:15):
was for me. It was my first taste of what
the hit record was. Baby Got Back wasn't just a
hit record. Not only did this song have backed, it
had legs. Do you know anyone who doesn't know this
song who can't recite at least hath its lyrics on
the spot? You could say it's part of the pop
culture fabric, but the fabric game big enough to contain it.
(45:39):
Its legacy spills out. Think of all its appearances in
film Charlie's Angels, Truck, on television, Friends, Sarah Palin belting
it out while dressed as a bear on the Massive Singer,
and in commercials or Your King not want to mix
(46:01):
his favorite endorsement by the way. Think of the parodies
in Living Colors, Jamie Foxx performing Baby Got Snacks as
trail mix a lot, and my favorite, the amazing video
compilation Baby Got Back Sung by the Movies, and which
different movie scenes are spliced together, so the characters like
Chucky the Terminator, Darth Theader, and Pete Herman say all
(46:23):
the words along to the song. Think about the throne
on which the female booty, not just the black female booty,
but the female booty in general, remains perched today Without
Baby Got Back? Would we have Destiny's Child's Bootylicious j
Low's ensured Assets, The Kardashians, Megan Trainers all about that Bass,
(46:47):
Megany Stallion Party, b lizz Owen or Emmy winning reality
series Watch Out for the Big Girls, Normandy singing about
bacon a cake in her two tho single wild Side,
Chloe Bailey singing about her big booty and her recent
song Have Mercy. Okay, maybe we'd have some of them,
but we certainly wouldn't have. Nicki minaj Is two thousand
(47:08):
fourteen single Anaconda, which sampled and flipped the script on
Baby Got Back with Manage, creating an ass empowerment anthem
from the woman's perspective. When asked about that song, Mix declared,
manage ease Baby Got Back, which was always about applauding
and owning your abundant backside. Now so many women recognize
(47:32):
that the ass is not something to hide, it's a
weapon to be wielded. One of the mixes fondest memories
of performing Baby Got Back occurred in June two thousand
and fourteen. The Seattle Symphony's Sonic Evolution, a concert showcasing
young composers presenting original music inspired by pop culture, included
a piece by Gabriel Prokofiev called Dial Mix a Lot
(47:57):
a reference to a line, and Baby Got Back. After
the piece, Mix was invited to perform an orchestral rendition
of Posse on Broadway, and then at ten minute rendition
of Baby Got Back. During the latter, some forty smartly
dressed women, many of whom were white, rushed the stage
to shake their asses. Please go find this on YouTube.
You will not be disappointed. Well, the video of that
(48:20):
performance went viral. Not everyone in the class of community
was impressed. The gambling community, however, was pretty ecstatic when
the Seminal Hard Rock Hotel and Casino at Hollywood, Florida,
unveils its I like Big Bucks slot machines in as
Dowdy On Bay writes in his two thousand twenty book
Emerald Street, The History of Hip Hop and Seattle, quote.
(48:44):
The immovable, staying power of the message and continued relevance
of this song some thirty years after its release suggest
Baby Got Back may not only have had the greatest
impact on modern culture of any rap song, but perhaps
any other song and any other genre period. That may
sound like hyperbole, but when asked what they think the
(49:05):
legacy of the song is, those involved in its creation, promotion,
and meteoric rise all seemed to agree. There was never
anything like Baby Got Back and there will never be
anything like it again. Adam Bernstein, director of the Baby
(49:30):
Got Back video. You know, I think the legacy on
one level, it's it's like you're you're taking his message
about inclusivity in the way beauty is defined, and you're
mixing that with entertainment, and it was just kind of
like a perfect storm. Mark Didilla, former general manager and
head of promotion Deaf American American Recordings a K. The
(49:54):
Keeper of the Inflatable Glass. I can imagine trying to
put a record like that out right now. The would
be canceled before I made it to the post office.
Dan Charnis, former vice president of A and R Deaf
American American Recordings. I remember many years later, my son
at age three year age four watching Shrek, and at
(50:16):
the end of Shrek, you know the Donkey character, you know,
the character that Eddie Murphy plays or voices, you know,
starts singing Baby Got Back. And so my son at
age four, age five is singing this song. And you know,
kids his age know that song. The greatest legacy of
Baby Got Back is the change in culture. Patty Gluzy,
(50:40):
MTV's former senior vice president of Music and Talent, had
a similar experience when she found herself watching an episode
of Friends with her young daughter years after the song's release.
In it, Ross made his baby laugh for the first
time by singing Baby Got Back to her, and I thought, wow,
you know, if that hadn't happened, if I hadn't had
at dinner with Mix, you know, if I hadn't been
(51:02):
able to go to bat, if Judy McGrath hadn't been
able to say I agree, I'm with you, let's go
back to standards and push this through, then you know,
it would not have been such a big part of
our culture. It would not have been on Friends. I mean,
(51:22):
I definitely think it was the first first instance of
there being something in pop culture that put forth a
body positivity message. And when he wrote this song, was
he thinking about body positivity for young women? I don't know,
(51:44):
but it is true that it is the first, the
very first, you know, instance that I can think of
that really celebrates that beauty comes in all kinds of
shapes and sizes, and you know, it's fantastic for that.
Asks her mix a lot, and he'll tell you his
one little songs. Big impact extends beyond Booty Pride. He
(52:07):
says that helped shift black female representation in the media
as a whole. The legacy of Baby Got Back would
probably be that it changed something that needed changing, but
from a shallow viewpoint. My viewpoint was shallow intentionally because
we weren't. You didn't see black female lawyers, you didn't
see black female accountants, you didn't see any of that.
(52:30):
But it's because everything else that came with them was
considered abnormal. That's kind of what Baby Got Back was.
It was basically trying to normalize African American beauty and
then hopefully more would come, and it did. It did
Baby Got Backs. Iconic ample booty video star Almond agrees,
I'm glad I did it. Because this thing like after that,
(52:52):
everybody jumped on the behind bandwag. It made history. It's history, baby,
and I'm part of that history. I was the first
one and it can never be taken from me on him.
(53:24):
Where Were You in ninety two was a production of
I Heart Radio. The executive producers are Noel Brown and
Jordan run Talk. The show was researched, written and hosted
by me Jason Lafier, with editing and sound design by
Michael Alder June. If you like what you heard, please
subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, check out the I Heart Radio app,
(53:46):
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Jason Lamphier
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