‘Baby Got Back’ still carries cultural significance

Sir Mix-A-Lot leaped ahead of his time with his definitive shout-out to the derriere, “Baby Got Back.”

“I like big butts and I cannot lie,” the Seattle rapper, real name Anthony Ray, famously confessed 25 years ago this month.

The truth he spoke was more than his own. The song spent five weeks at No .1 and its old 2 million copies, back when people had to go to a store to buy music. It also helped put Seattle hip-hop on the map, and in the process making Sir Mix-

A-Lot our first rap superstar. “Baby Got Back” shook up more than the pop charts and the delicate sensibilities of the time. (MTV only played the music video after 9 p.m.) The anthem unashamedly praises a body type that seldom appeared on billboards, in movies or on catwalks, and it treats pop culture’s historic sidelining and pigeonholing of people of color for what they are — racist.

“Oh. My. God. Becky, look at her butt … I mean gross … She’s just so, black.” The opening dialogue of “Baby Got Back,” spoken by what is supposed to be two white women who seem to believe that a brownskinned woman flaunting her curvaceous backside must nec- essarily be “one of those rap guys’ girlfriends” and looks like a prostitute, stings even today. The women’s scathing observations offer listeners the first clue as to what Sir Mix-A-Lot is really up to here: “Baby Got Back” is in fact a clever protest song dressed in the skintight jeans of a novelty tune. The song simultaneously objectifies and subjectifies black and brown women, reframing an underappreciated physical attribute as the ultimate symbol of desirability.

Now, 25 years later, fitness publications now routinely feature articles and advice on how women and men of all colors can achieve showy, protruding bubble butts.

Fashion and beauty brands, recognizing the profit poten- tial and essential rightness of marketing to a broader audience, are starting to hire fullerfigured models.

Women of color are boldly demanding, and slowly receiving, more exposure on catwalks and in magazines.

And no disrespect to Sir Mix-A-Lot, but female musical artists of color themselves now lead the charge to glorify physical attributes associated with people who have African ancestry, as Nicki Minaj does on her joyously re-imagined, woman-centric take on “Baby Got Back,” 2014’s “Anaconda,” as Jennifer Lopez does in her 2014 ode “Booty” and as Solange does on her more meditative 2016 single “Don’t Touch My Hair.”

The “Beckys” of the world might be changing their tune too. The white pop star Miley Cyrus has made a stellar career out of celebrating the rearend, twerking her way across countless stages with a dance move that is its elf rooted in black culture.

And Meghan Trainor has nothing but love for her full frame in her hit, also from 2014, “All About that Bass,” which tells listeners doubting the beauty of their larger bodies that “every inch of you is perfect.”

And then there’s Kim Kardashian on the cover of Paper magazine.

Sir Mix-A-Lot may have had a very specific type of person in mind with “Baby Got Back” 25 years ago, but he helped push us all forward.