'And I Cannot Prevarication': The Oral History of Sir Mix-a-Lot'south 'Baby Got Back' Video

Micro Oral Histories

America received the ultimate booty telephone call on May 7, 1992, courtesy of Seattle rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot and his song "Baby Got Back." Since its release through legendary rap-rock producer Rick Rubin's Def American label, the up-tempo track — which spent five weeks at No. 1 and was the 2nd-best-selling unmarried of 1992, afterwards Whitney Houston'southward "I Will Always Love You lot" — has become our national anthem of ass, spawning innumerable parodies, cover versions (nearly notably Jonathan Coulton's viral 2005 version), and references, including onFriends and inShrek and Charlie'south Angelsmovies. The song's long-lasting success owes greatly to its winking video, which, aside from featuring Sir Mix-a-Lot dancing atop a giant derrière and countless buttocks-related visual puns, generated a good for you amount of buzz when MTV banned it and fans, including Bruce Springsteen, countered that it offered a far more realistic glimpse at the female form than other music videos of the day. As part of our micro oral histories week, Vulture corralled Rubin, Sir Mix-a-Lot (real proper name: Anthony Ray), the video'due south manager Adam Bernstein (also of Breaking Bad fame), and others to bring you the story behind the behind-centric classic.

Sir Mix-a-Lot (producer/writer/performer, "Babe Got Back"): Amylia Dorsey was my girlfriend at the time, the girl that did the "Oh my gawd, Becky" intro [to the song]. Yous think J.Lo had a body? No competition! We were together viii, nine years.

Amylia Dorsey-Rivas (voice artist, "Baby Got Dorsum"): My background is such that being a woman of colour — I'chiliad half-Mexican, half-black, and have always been curvy — was not appreciated at all. Where I grew up, in the suburbs of Seattle, if y'all 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 6-pes-tall girls who weighed 90 pounds. But I didn't get much piece of work, and neither did anyone who looked like me. You could take the highest cheekbones in the globe, but if you were a picayune more wide at the beam, forget it. The kind of matter that women in my position went through made Mix angry. He'd say "I don't sympathize why you can't get modeling work," and I'd say "Look backside me." This was my feel that he was writing about.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: There was ane outcome that actually fabricated me remember that I should do a song about this, which was irritating the shit out of me. Amy and I were at a hotel on tour, when we saw one of the Spuds MacKenzie ads for Budweiser during the Super Bowl. Yous'd see these girls in the ad: Each one was shaped like a stop sign, with big pilus [and] straight up-and-down bird legs. At that place'southward nothing incorrect with that, simply I was so sick of that shit. Now, Amy never said anything about all this until she realized I was and then in favor of her physique. She was an actress, and she started albeit that she felt like she lost a lot of parts because of her hourglass figure. I knew for a fact that many artists felt that if they didn't use a skinny-model-blazon woman in their video, then mainstream America would reject the song. But I do not agree with that: If you wait at Dolly Parton at her peak, a lot of white guys were similar "daammn!" At the aforementioned time, when I did casting calls for videos, curvy women wouldn't evidence upwards. They thought they didn't take a chance. Unless you were in the hood, women who had curves — and I'grand not talking about women who are shaped like me, with a gut, but women who ran v miles a day, with a washboard, half-dozen-pack stomach and a prissy round, beautiful, supple ass — wore sweaters effectually their waist! Bottom line: Blackness men like curves. When they're crooning to women about how beautiful they are in an R&B song, the ladies you come across in the video don't reflect what those guys like. Every time an R&B video was on, I heard women say, "I just saw him down in Oakland, and his girls wasn't like that." That made me retrieve that this was more than a funny song, and it wrote itself.

Dorsey-Rivas: I have virtually twoscore to fifty unlike voices that I practise. There were so many kids coming in and out of my household — my parents had nearly xl foster kids; I was adopted — that I picked up lots of unlike accents. The one [at the starting time of] "Baby" was based on girls I grew up around. My friend and I would constantly do that voice back and along as a joke: I'd call her and say: "hell-loh" or "ohmygawd!!!" He'd heard me do the phonation many times; it comes the easiest of all the voices I do, and he loved it.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: I thought it was the 2d worst song on the record. I turned in three songs to Rick; each seemed similar a better single. And so he chosen me: "Yous may wanna recollect of something more up-tempo. These songs come off gangster; yous're from Seattle, and I don't need to hear more gangster shit." So I scrapped the original rails for "Infant Got Dorsum" and made a more up-tempo track. It's rare that a big hit hip-hop vocal is fast, but Rick fell in love with it equally soon as he heard the revised rail. There was one modify he suggested: "On your dial line, I need you lot to hit mute, and drop the music out so that people can hear what you're saying. That'due south gonna bulldoze the song." That's where "my anaconda don't want none" or "I'm thinkin' about stickin'" came from. Equally shortly as he heard the finished rail, he said, "People are gonna exist talking nigh this twenty years from now."

Dan Charnas (vice-president of A&R, Def American/American Recordings, 1991–97; writer, The Big Payback: The History of the Business concern of Hip-Hop): Rick wanted "Baby" to come out as a single showtime, but Mix-a-Lot wanted "In one case's Got No Example." Rick let Mix have his manner, and it did side by side to null: It wasn't pop with hip-hop D.J.'s. Hip-hop was gangstas and A Tribe Called Quest at the time. Information technology had a to be a pop thing, and that'due south how Rick related to him anyway. He knew "Infant" was gonna be a big single, and he knew who he wanted to straight the video.

Rick Rubin (possessor, Def American/American Recordings): I was a fan of the videos Adam Bernstein directed for They Might Be Giants and the B-52s. I idea the combination of his quirky alt-rock style with Mix's suburban hip-hop would yield something nosotros hadn't seen before.

Adam Bernstein (manager, "Infant Got Back" video): Rick called me to run into if I wanted to straight the video. When you had a meeting with Rick, he would arrive in his Rolls Royce, and you would get in and he would play whichever song actually loud. Which is the way I heard "Baby Got Dorsum" for the first time. I thought that the song objectified women, only it made me express mirth, and I thought it would be fun. I had previously been offered the take a chance to direct an LL Cool J song, "Big Ole Butt," but I didn't exercise it. This time, I needed to leave of New York because I broke upwards with my girlfriend and she got the apartment. So doing this video was a matter of adept timing — though I had done "Hey Ladies" for the Beastie Boys.

Dana Hollister (costume designer, "Babe Got Dorsum" video): I worked on "Hey Ladies" with Adam. I approximate I did a lot of ass stuff at that time.

Bernstein: Then I had a coming together with Mix-a-Lot to talk about the concept. He really wanted a giant ass in the video, and he wanted to be coming out of it. I suggested that mayhap that wasn't a corking thought. For the casting of all the dancers, Mix and his friends wanted to have barrel approval. So the dancers would come in for the audition, and I had to snap a polaroid of their butts. I was mortified: "Okay, at present I take to have a shut-up picture show of your buttocks." Merely a lot of the women auditioning thought it was hilarious. We took all the Polaroids, and made a behemothic filigree of the buttocks, which we Fed-Exed to Seattle so that Mix and his friends could approve the butts.

Hollister: I made all the costumes that the dancers were wearing. I made the golden shorts and the banana skirt (come across paradigm below). I had a $500 budget, so I got glitter at the craft shop and covered the bananas with information technology at home before the shoot.

Bernstein: I concocted the visuals based around the giant donkey. Dana and I leafed through a book almost Jean-Paul Goude, a French style photographer who happened to be donkey-obsessed. So the shape of the butt was inspired by his work. Then we talked about what color to make it, and we settled on golden, because of the line in the song ["Some brothers wanna play that hard role/And tell y'all that the butt ain't gold"]. It was made of pencil-steel, which is what aircraft frames are made of, and fiberglass. We shot information technology at the Clergyman, a big studio nigh A&Grand Records off of La Brea, between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: I was a niggling worried. "Man, this is gonna come off cheeseball." Then I walked on the set, and the first thing I saw was a fifty-human foot yellow ass. Me and my guys simultaneously said, "What the fuck? Someone made this affair?" They said it was gonna be big, simply it didn't make any sense until y'all saw that it was as large equally a house. In that location was a ladder going up the backside, and I was running all effectually that donkey. At that place were bug initially. What really bothered me was that the main daughter sitting on the pedestal at the beginning of the song had on a blonde wig, tiger shorts, a bunch of golden chains, a cheap-donkey satin gown, and ugly lipstick: She looked like a ho! I thought, What the hell is this? [Although] to exist honest, if I saw her on the street, I might say, "What'southward upwardly, baby?" Adam said, "I thought you wanted hot?" But I told him, "This song is called 'Baby Got Back,' non 'Infant'due south a Ho.'" We concluded up going to the mall with the wardrobe people to get other dress, and they inverse her pilus, and shooting was held up for four hours. Her name was Almond, and she said, "Thank God, I didn't want to wearable this." Pop civilisation says that if a blackness girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white every bit possible, to the point of bleaching her pilus blonde. But the unabridged signal of the vocal was the contrary. The lady who the white girls were looking at in the intro was supposed to exist a queen that they saw every bit a ho, not an actual ho.

Charnas: The girls in the video were bandage past people who didn't quite understand what they were engaged in culturally.

Bernstein: I don't remember anything about dressing anyone similar a prostitute, merely there was a kerfuffle in the wardrobe room with Dana.

Hollister: Mix pulled a glock on me, because I challenged the way he was dressed for art direction purposes, and he freaked out on me.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: That'south bullshit. [Laughs uproariously.] There is no way I would travel across land lines into California with those gun laws. Pulling a gun on a guy is plenty of a punk movement, merely a adult female?

Hollister: Merely I wasn't having information technology: "Are you fucking kidding me? A gun?" He was wearing all brown, and he would have been standing on the butt, looking similar … you know!

Sir Mix-a-Lot: I was wearing a dark-brown shirt and brown pants, and they were taking Polaroids, and I saw that I looked like dancing turd. My boys said, "You ever talking like you're the shit. Well, now you really the shit." They still ride me on that.

Hollister: The incident was all of 2 minutes. He realized that we had his best interests at center. He's a lovely guy.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: [This video] meant a lot to me: Bernstein and the video people were taking something from me and fucking information technology upward. I realized that I was fighting an uphill battle with Bernstein: He had been conditioned the aforementioned way everybody else had and didn't go information technology.

Hollister: If you do something like this video, it goes into the culture then into history, so you understand that he might be sensitive to how he's going to be perceived.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: In the end, though, I was very happy with the video, and I'thousand not mad at anyone who worked on it.

Bernstein: We permit each dancer freestyle, and so I would edit in shots coordinated with the song wherever appropriate. 1 dancer did that great flying boot, and it fabricated sense to sync that shot with the kung-fu picture Whopp-pish! sound in the track. I think I may have come upwards with the Josephine Baker and Madonna references, and with the white guy nervously loosening his tie. Just others were pointed to by his lyrics: He references Cosmo, and someone knew the latin-derived word for someone with a dainty ass is "callipygian." That'south where nosotros got "Cosmo-pygian."

Rubin: I loved the video and call up working closely with Adam on the nuances of the edit.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: I was nervous because my music had previously been on an contained characterization, where the threshold for success was very depression. We put the vocal out, and we go on this promo tour. Halfway through it, the record went No. one and information technology blew my mind. The kickoff date was in Salt Lake Metropolis Utah: 300 people [turned out]. The concluding was in Panama Urban center, Florida, and at that place were so many people there that the balcony collapsed. So we did Arsenio (see clip below), and right before that I had a meeting where someone said, "How does it feel to exist banned from MTV?" I was like, excuse me? At present I call back my career's over. I remember talking to Heidi Robinson, Rick's publicist, and she said, "No, no! Now you're the forbidden fruit; now y'all're really gonna sell some records!"

Heidi Ellen Robinson (longtime publicist for Def American/American Recordings): Controversy gets my claret going. The worst thing that could have happened with this vocal would be ambiguity. The only matter I tin compare it to was working with the Sexual practice Pistols.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: And it worked! Later MTV agreed to play it after 9 p.g. Everybody thought I should have been mad at MTV, merely you're talking near a station that just made me a million dollars. I thought they wouldn't play information technology straight out of the gate.

Patti Galluzzi (senior vice-president of music and talent, MTV, 1988–98): As a music programmer at MTV, I was the first person who would scout every single video. And so, videos would exist sent to standards and practices, and word came down that "Babe," while a nifty, hilarious video, was not going to air. People like to use the word banned: Yous can be righteous, equally if MTV is called-for books. But banning is not the same equally a programming conclusion with respect to a video that directly flouted a then-recently instituted dominion confronting showing female person body parts with no reference to a face. Nosotros were trying to movement abroad from MTV'due south contempo past, when videos showing slices of pie would driblet into a girl's lap, like in Warrant'due south "Cherry Pie," were shown effectually the clock.

Rubin: I had these old-fashioned, engraved desk plaques made that read "Call MTV Re: Mix-a-Lot" and left them on the desks in the office of every staff fellow member. I knew if nosotros could go MTV onboard, discussion would spread.

Galluzzi: I was at this radio conference in Seattle where I didn't know anyone. The first nighttime I ate dinner in my hotel room by myself. The second night, Benny Medina —a Warner Bros. executive after to correspond Mariah and J.Lo — walked up to me and asked if I had dinner plans. I knew somebody! Then I met upward with him and Ricardo Frazier, a very handsome man who I knew was Mix's manager, at a eating place. I noticed that there was a fourth chair at the table, and I realized this was a allurement-and-switch, and in walks Sir Mix-a-Lot. I merely went with it; this was my job. The chat got around to, "We take this incredible vocal and video, and you guys won't play information technology." I explained MTV'southward rules. Just finally, Mix told me that he felt that the message of the vocal is that all women are constantly bombarded with images of super-thin models on TV and in magazines, and he thought that women and immature girls demand to hear that not everyone feels that way, likewise as defending a more African-American body image. He was also speaking direct to me: I had back and front, and so and at present. And then I said, "You know what? I'll go back to NYC and bring this to the top." Which would have been Judy McGrath, VP of creative — and with me standing there with my curves, she was sympathetic. Standards and practices still insisted on the removal of specific shots, similar Mix doing push-ups on the barrel, or other really tight barrel shots. They cleaned it upwardly, and finally we could play information technology after 9 p.1000., when immature kids are going to be asleep.

Robinson: More often than not, information technology was male person journalists who didn't similar the song. I'm certain their intention was to be very pro-woman and protective. In that location were some women who took offense.

Bernstein: 2 principals in Epoch, the production visitor I was working for at the time, were female and were and so disappointed in me after seeing the video. They were offended, merely at that place'due south a cultural difference, in that black women loved information technology. Later on the video blew up, those women changed their minds.

Mark DiDia (full general manager, Def American/American Recordings, 1991–97): "Babe" was controversial, and we had to promote it with the methods bachelor at the time: in-store play, street teams, video, and radio. Only Mix didn't like to fly, so we decided that if he wouldn't tour as much equally we would similar, we would tour a behemothic, inflatable ass. Nosotros would put it on peak of record stores and radio stations, or in the parking lot and blast the song.

Robinson: We sent it to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles, and then effectually the country. One day the producer of Falling Down saw information technology on peak of Temple Records in Hollywood and he put information technology in the movie.

Chanas: It was a good-looking donkey; if it was real, I would have hit it! It was often shot at with arrows and bullets, and then had to exist patched up and re-inflated. I was the butt-airship managing director.

DiDia: Sometimes I would be on briefing calls: "Well, Mix can't come to Texas, just I can offer y'all this inflatable donkey." Information technology was then pop we had to make a second one.

Robinson: I quoted Marker on 1 press release: "If nothing else, this was the well-nigh expensive piece of ass we ever paid for."

Sir Mix-a-Lot: Afterward that, I started to see songs like "Milkshake Your Rump," and I was like, Aye! "Baby Got Back" was the marijuana, merely [controversial rapper Luther Campbell alias] Luke Skyywalker's shit was the cocaine. And then at that place was Jamie Foxx on In Living Colour every bit Trail Mix-a-Lot [doing] "Babe Got Snacks." Information technology might have contradicted the message of "Baby" but a flake, but I thought it was funny as hell.

Charnas: It was not lost on any of us that this was Sir Mix-a-lot's pop moment. I would go to Bally'southward gym every night in Hollywood, and I started to hear information technology on the radio in that location: "That's my record!"

Sir Mix-a-Lot: I notwithstanding honey "Baby Got Back." I will perform it until I drop. Information technology's completely ignorant when an artist has a successful, iconic vocal that makes millions of dollars, but slaps his fans in the face when he says, "That song ain't shit, I'thou bigger than that." I appreciate the fact that people got behind that song dorsum in the day, so I practise a fuckin' ten-minute-long version live. You should gloat having a vocal that damn large. In that location are songs that sold more than at the time, only you don't hear 'em now. Still, two years later on "Babe Got Back," people still didn't get information technology. I was gonna practice this video for "Ride" [off 1994'south Master Boot Knocka]. I met with a potential managing director and we talked nearly what I wanted the girls to await like. I wanted them to be thick, but he said, "You lot want fat women in the video?" I gave him the example of Marilyn Monroe; she exemplifies beauty. And he said "Marilyn Monroe? That'due south more like a whore."

Dorsey-Rivas: It's weird to open up a karaoke book and run into that song in that location 20 years afterwards, or to hear 6- and 7-year-former children imitate my intro. Fifty-fifty if I'd never contributed to information technology, I would still have appreciated what it did. When people said it was degrading, I would say there'southward not one thing degrading virtually that song to anyone who felt like me.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: Now, donkey isn't a big deal. I get to the gym, and I'll hear a white girl maxim to her trainer, "I want this to exist round." They realize that it doesn't mean that yous're out of shape if yous have a nice ass. Anybody who's ever seen a stripper selection up a dollar bill with her donkey knows you can't practice that with fat.

Charnas: Mix-a-Lot did not act lonely. There was Luke, Wreckx-N-Consequence, and many others. But his was the loudest vox for this cultural overthrow of the Euro-axial beauty artful, in favor of something more akin to what America would like 20 years hence: Blackness women are at present on the covers of magazines, which used to exist very risky. "Baby" will forever be a slap-up combination of a giddy pop song with an earnest resolve to alter the perception of body paradigm in America.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: It was something nosotros just talked about in a locker room or a guild before "Baby." But black women got the vocal immediately. Everybody to my mom, to Amylia, to every black adult female I knew or met said "virtually time" and "thank you." Girls who didn't have big butts idea the vocal was cute, but girls who did have butts thought it was a revolution.

Sir Mix-a-Lot 'Babe Got Back' Video Oral History