“Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that gives you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music and more. My name is Jordan Runtug and I'm Alex Hegele. And today we're talking about the salute to the glute, the bow to the booty, the cheer to the rear, the anthem of the ass Yes, the hip hop song that even your grandma will dance to a family functions. I'm talking about the Immortal Baby Got Back by Sir mix a Lot, Night of the Turntable, first of his name, Duke of the Dry Air and friend to butts of all sizes. You are getting a politze for that if I have to wrench it out of someone else's called dead hands. But this song deserves it. It has managed to transcend generations quite literally, based on pure goofy nous. Really mean, come on, you don't have that with Rex and effects or juvenile uh. Juveniles persisted, but it's it's not doesn't come from the same lightheartedness. I'll say yes. This song turned thirty years old this year. Is released on May seven, and um, I think it's truly just as relevant as ever. What do you think about this song? What are your impressions, your memories, your hot tapes? You know, I grew up a child of the nineties, so this was like shoved into my face and literally every opportunity, usually a boy your former employer of VH one. Did they do it behind the music on him or do they just catch him? Or is this one of the this might have been part of the best one hit wonders. Yeah, so I have no quarrel with Cervix a lot. The more I read about him, the more I think I'd like him. I don't. I'm really tired of hearing the damn song. But you know it is it has a sort of a universal charm, I mean, universal message. But it's goofy and kind of the same way that like and kind of and lighthearted in the kind of the same way that like bismarckis. Like, you know, just a friend is like you're five years old and the first time you hear someone say I like, but I cannot on the radio, and you're just like, it's just so funny, and it sears it into your head. Maybe one of the most epic opening lines to any piece of film, television, epic poetry. Yeah, so you know what, I gotta give it to Mix. Great song, A little bit overplayed, great song. What is it? Robert Plant says about Stairwoid to Heaven. Oh, I think it's a good song. I've just heard it before. Um, well, let's get to it. We have quite a tale involving guns, nuns, inflatable butts, and so much more. Here's everything you didn't know about Baby got Back before the bunts. Mix was already kind of a big deal, that is right, Yes, sir, Mix a lot. He's kind of been relegated to one hit wonder status, but he was actually a regional hip hop star long before his nineties heyday. He was born Anthony Ray, and Mix was basically an early bedroom beat maker, crafting his beats in his Seattle home with drum machines and Korgs and mog since. Uh, and the commodore is that I don't really know what that is. Oh, it's one of the earliest Jankeest computers. I think they do a uh Simpson's bit about it or something. It's just it's a relic of a better time and This is really interesting to me. He was inspired not so much by hip hop but by electronic music from people like Devo and Gary Newman and Kraft Work. So he was a really unique voice in the burgeoning Seattle rap scene, which was absolutely not known as a you know, a nationwide hip hop hot bed. Uh. Seattle native and G unit producer Jake One recalled an interview with Cocaine Blunts. I think I would assume that's the name of the outlet. By the time Sir Mix came out nationally, he was almost kind of old to the people here in Seattle. He was everywhere. He had song that were big that never even came out. I think that means never even released as a single. Yeah, because this is the era where you can have huge club bangers that were never really released because you might have come out as a club mix on a just like a single pressing that kind of thing. And so after some early independent releases, he found it a label Nasty Mix, with a local radio DJ. But one of the acts on Nasty Mix Kids Sensation, released a record in two that featured then Seattle Mariners outfielder Ken Griffey Jr. On the track The Way I swing, which I love. His first album was swass. I think it's how you pronounced It's an acronym? What's the stand for? Heigl? Why you throw that to me? Some wild ass silly and that album, his debut, made it into the Billboard R and B Top twenty chart, and it went platinum, which means it sold a million copies, and so did his follow up, Seminar, and the success was purely word of mouth and music writer Dotty Abe but right in the book Emerald Street, the seismic nature of an independent Seattle based record label releasing back to back platinum selling rap albums by a Seattle based artist cannot be overstated. So again, Sir Mix kind of a big deal long before Baby Got Back was ever heard of, And this is interesting, some of his early pre Baby Got Back stuff actually has quite the legacy. Mixed basically positioned himself as sort of the self deprecating every man, and his songs were surprisingly progressive for the time, and he had one called The Peekaboo Game, which tackled teen pregnancy and sexual abuse. He had National Anthem, which was a critique of extreme patriotism in America's foreign policy, but probably his biggest pre Baby Got backtrack is Posse om Broadway, which is sort of a stone cold, isn't sort of? It is a stone cold hip hop classic in which he wraps about macing a guy who's about to get violent with his girlfriend, and to kind of put this in context, this is the same arrow in nWay are referring to win in his hose and other very you know, on gallant terms. Um. So, obviously the misogyny bar in this era is very low, but this was pretty radical Posse on Broadway. And interestingly, the song Policy on Broadway was sampled in the Pussycat Dolls hit Don't You and also Natalie's Rap, in which Natalie A. Portman throws down a bunch of hard rhymes by the Lonely Island. But by the early nineties Mix It had a falling out with his Nasty Mixed Records co founder, and with two platinum records under his belt, he was wooed away to join a major label. In this case, it was Rick Ruben's Deaf American label, which was flushed with cash from the success of The Black Crows and how Dare You, Glenn Danzig's first solo records. That's right, I'm sorry. As producers, Sir Mix a Lot and Rick Rubin were pretty well aligned because they both really believe in stripping tracks down to their core, and so the stage has been set. Her baby got back in. Butts were at a crossroads. Uh Mix was watching super Bowl twenty one on TV and eight seven with his girlfriend at the time when a Budweiser ad came on featuring the beer's mascot, a bull Terrier named Spuds mackenzie, played by a dog named Honey Tree Evil Eye, which rules anyway. In the commercial, Spuds McKenzie pilots a submarine that crashes a supermodel party on a yacht. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous host Robin Leach is there. They play backgammon. It is very weird. But the crucial part of this, or at least the part that's Germaine to our narration at this point, is that this entourage of models, they all have the same identical super slender runway model body type. And Mix was watching this with his girlfriend at the time. As I mentioned, a woman named Amelia Dorsey Rivers who was also a model, and she was struggling to find work because of her curvy body shape, and she was constantly losing out to women who looked like all of these models and the ads. And she would say in an interview with Vulture, where I grew up in 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 and makeup and runway classes to six ft tall girls who weighed ninety pounds. But I didn't get much work, and neither did anyone who looked like me. Women who were built like me were not what was popular at the time. This Budweiser ad naturally then became a flashpoint for unrealistic body beauty standards of the era, and in a Vulture oral history years later for the website vultured he was not telling this to a Vulture. UM makes a Lot told the story. He said, each one of those models was shaped like a stop sign, which is a funny diss with big hair and straight up and down bird legs. There's nothing wrong with that, but I was so sick of that ship. He talked about seeing women tying sweaters around their races to hide their butts and it made him sad, and nothing should ever make Sir Mix a lot sad. His frustration over homogeneous body types in media sowed the seeds for Baby Got Back as an attempt to, in his words, brought in the definition of beauty. At least yeah, and at least that's his official socially conscious version of the Baby Got Back origin story, because in a two fortune interview with TMZ, he also talked about being inspired by seeing Jennifer Lopez and presumably her butt as one of the fly girls on in Living Color in the early nineties. That is slightly less heroic, but lest we forget the booties that came before, it would be unfair to say that Sir Mix. Is it Sir Mix or Sir a lot um? You know, I think that in the British knighthood system it's Sir first name. I think it's Sir Mix. Okay, so it's not say it would be ungenerous to the long lineage of butts. Before Sir Mix his pioneering work, there was debut by Experience Unlimited um Peaches and Herbs disco track Shake Your Groove Thing, Casey and the Sunshine Bands, Shake Your Booty, and of course a little Cool J's song Big Old Butt. My favorite out of those is Doubut because it was written for the Spike Lee movie School Days by Marcus Miller, who is this virtuoso electric bassist who is also Luther Vandross's musical director in the nineteen eighties, and he played with Miles Davis. So that is the most musically pedigreed but song in my opinion. But Jordan's tell us about how they arrived at the now iconic track. Yes, it's the early nineties and cir mixes recording his first album with Rick Rubin, not y two's Mac Daddy, and towards the end of the session, he turns his attention towards this new song he's working on, Daby Got Back, and it's the second of the last song it records for the album, and he doesn't have high hopes for it, which is pretty hilarious considering it would go on to make over a hundred million dollars. Uh Mix later said, I hated Baby Got Back. I thought this song will never make it. I thought it was gonna piss everybody off, but I wanted to piss everybody off. But I didn't think it was going to be a hit, and this early version might not have been a hit. The first incarnation and Baby Got Back was very slow, not exactly a ballad, but not the banger that would become. And Rick Rubin was the one who really believed in it and encouraged Mixed to bump up the tempo and do stuff like fade the music out on the Anaconda part, you know, mute it to kind of emphasize the lyrics, um and all sorts of other you know, it's why he's a production genius. But still, Sir Mixed thought Baby Got Back was the worst song on the album and he didn't want it to be a single at all. Instead, he wanted to release the song One Times Got No Case, which was a track about racist police harassment. And Rick Rubin went along with it kind of halfheartedly. But the song didn't hit it big well, I mean you say that it got the number ten on the Billboard Hot Rap Songs. Yeah, but that's still not the big mainstream hit that it would be. But so I'm just being I'm being pedantic. It's kind of my thing. No, it's I appreciate that. So at this point, Mix said, all right, you know what, Rick, do your thing, and he consented and co signed the release for Baby Got Back. And here's some other some interesting parts that go into the uh the musical gumbo if you will, that forms Baby Got Back and I will to build the up tempo version of the song. Mix wrote his own baseline and sampled the Detroit Techno classic Technicolor by Channel one by borrowing its drum pattern and the electric blips and pings. And this marked a very different approach to beat making for him, because this earlier work often sampled found sounds instead of other people's music, and he would later say, when samplers finally came along, it never occurred to me to steal somebody else's music. I would bust a beer on the ground or shoot off guns. I would use anything. So that's really interesting. He's using like field recordings to make his early beats. And there's another really distinctive sample used um to complete mixes line that but you got makes dot dot dot and the line is the line is me so horny, which I feel like will be sampled me saying that and board till the end of time. UH. And that line of dialogue is spoken by actress Papillon Sou. Yes, and that is in Stanley Kubrick's classic Full Metal Jacket. Yeah, it's kind of messed up. She is playing a a sex worker in that so Vietnam one. Right, yes, yeah, um, but she had actually made her film debut in A View to a Kill two years earlier at least favorite Yeah, most people's least favorite Bond movie. Um. But that snippet, it's kind of sad that she was an actress and she is now lodged in the popular consciousness for the SoundBite because Miami hip hop pioneers and inadvertent free speech activists to Live Crew had dropped their first hot one track, Miso Horny in you interviewed Luther Right, I did? Yes, that was. It was actually on the anniversary of the of the Free Speech case. But the other part of the spoken word part of the song that everyone remembers is the opening Valley girl voice. And yes, we are talking about the intro, the oh my god, Becky, look at her butt? Do it for real? Do it for real? Come on, Nope, I'm not. That line was You'd only get so many impressions out of me, rundog Uh That line is spoken by Sir makes his girlfriend Amelia Dorsey Rivas, who is at his side for ground zero of the song when he watched the Budweiser Super Bowl ad. In addition to being a model, Amelia is an accomplished voice over artist, and she says that her ability to do a flawless Valley girl accent is due to her upbringing. Her adoptive parents fostered a number of children, and she said, there were so many kids coming in and out of my household that I picked up lots of different accents. The one at the beginning of Baby was based on girls I grew up around. So this song is also ground zero for another bit of now enshrined in the lexicon bit of slang the phrase becky as a reference to white women benefiting from white privilege. Beyonce helped reintroduce it on Lemonade the song sorry with a Becky with a good hair line that if you were working in digital media at the time, as we both were, remembered a small cottage industry of think pieces coming up trying to identify who Becky actually was, but using it and maybe got back was meant to define beauty standards and mainstream expectations for women in terms of what was deemed desirable. Now we're coming to one of my favorite bits on the show. What we talk about when we talk about butts. Yes, this brings us to the deeper main of Baby Got Back. On the surface is easy to view the song is degrading to women by objectifying a specific part of their anatomy, but unsurprisingly, Sir Mix does not see it that way. His argument was that he was celebrating black beauty standards in a cultural climate where healthy women were made to feel ugly. To quote him, I ain't talking about Playboy because silicone parts are made for toys. And also another line in the song, so Cosmos says you're fat, while I ain't down for that. In interview with Tacoma Weekly, he said the song is really talking about the lack of acceptance by Hollywood of the African American body, and he name checks women's beauty magazines like Vogue and cosmoic I said earlier, as well as music videos by rock bands like White Snake Rat and Bon Jovi which objectified big haired, thin hipped Caucasian models. And he said in another interview around the same time, before Baby Got Back. Beauty was defined one way. Six foot blonde, blue eyes. That was it. That was the main stream way of looking at it, and I didn't agree at all. I didn't want the song to sound like an alternative to what people think beautiful is. I wanted to say this is beautiful period. Uh. There have been some who made the argument that Baby Got Back is an anti colonialist protest, which may be overstanding simply, but it's an interesting take. But for all the goofy lyricism and imagery, and again we didn't even start talking about the video yet. Mix Is maintained that the message of Baby Got Back is sincere, and he said in an interview with DJ vladd recently, initially it was gonna be a serious song, but I realized if it was serious, they wouldn't take it seriously. It would just be dismissed. So he went the comedic route. And as he says, before people knew it was about, it had already sold three or four million copies. You gotta put a little honey and to get people to swallow the bitter truth of what you're saying. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. So I mentioned the video earlier one of the less progressive parts of this old saga, Yes, we're getting into the video now. Uh So, Sir Mix says that Baby Got Back is a way of taking a stand for representation, body positivity, and acceptance. But this progressive anti colonialist stance is undercut, ever so slightly by the fact that models auditioning for Baby Got Back the music video were required to provide polaroids of their posterior. Yes, the video was directed by Adam Bernstein, who also did the Hey Ladies video for the Beastie Boys and Love Shack for the B fifty twos. So this guy clearly had the market cornered on cheeky, irreverent music videos of the late eighties and early nineties. Apparently, and ironically, Adam Bernstein had been offered the chance to direct the music video for ll O Cool Jay's Big Old Butt, but he passed. But thankfully the chance came around again you Can Go Home Again, and this time he accepted, and he took on Sir Mix's Baby Got Back video project, and he teamed up with the costume designer Dana Hollister, who also worked with him on the Hay Ladies video, and in a moment of really brutal self reflection, Danta Hollister observed, I guess I did a lot of ask stuff in that time, which is hell of a sound bite. But anyway, Dana and Annam Bernstein had a meeting with Sir Mix that discussed the concept for the video, and in another priceless quote, director Adam Bernstein recalls of the meeting, Sir Mix really wanted a giant ass in the video, and he wanted to be coming out of it. I suggested that that maybe wasn't a great idea, and it was at this meeting that Mix outlined his terms, and one of them was that he wanted him and his friends to have what Bernstein called but approval. And so the director and his crew took polaroids of various applicants um fundamental parts of their body, which they then sent to Sir Mix a lot for evaluation and to quote Bernstein and vultures or all history piece. The dancers would come in for audition and I had to snap a polaroid of their butts. I was mortified, but a lot of the women auditioning thought it was hilarious. We took all the polaroids, made a giant grid of them and then FedEx them the seattle so that Mix and his friends could approve the butts. I am, I I know, I reference this, I feel like on every episode, but I am thinking of the beautiful mind style, huge grid with strings all through it. Sir Mix very seriously trying to choose the best butts for his Big Butts video. Just a quick note on Bernstein. He started as an animator and worked on the Adventures of Pete and Pete for Nickelodeon, of all things. Did you know that? No? I didn't. Yeah, so he went from one of the most beloved children's shows and networks of all time too. But uh, he has gone on to become quite a successful TV director. He won Emmy in two thousand seven for thirty Rock. So, in other words, asked stuff was very very good to him. And now from the makers of Large Plane comes Large Ass. Yes, that was not all that Bernstein had on his plate. He and costume designer Dana Hollister mold over the set and art design for the video. Ultimately, they were inspired by the work of Jean Paul good, a French fashion photographer who has quite the thing for butts. His work directly inspired Kim Kardashians Break the Internet paper magazine cover. You may remember her butt being exposed on that whatever good is fascinating and deeply problematic. He has a very European, which is to say, callous, appropriative and pretty dumb fascination with a black women. He has a whole book about it that he called Jungle Fever. That Kim photo shoot was essentially a reproduction of one of the photo of a black woman taken from that book, and that photo in that book was a nod to these eighteenth century exploitation photos of a woman who had been called the hot and tought venus. Her real name was Sartig Barkman, and she was basically trotted around throughout Victorian era shows and what have you because she had um, you know, very characteristically what they thought at the time of African uh posterior features. So they were just trotting her around as like a side show, being like, look at this woman's butt. And I feel like it's important to recognize this point as sort of part of what Sir Mix was talking about and how angry he was and how you know, it's easy to roll arise at his explanation about body positivity and everything and saying that he just reverse engineered that explanation so we could make a shocking goofy video. But I mean that story about the hot and taught venus is horrific and awful and just be so in reigns in culture. It's easy to understand, like how he could be that angry in that furious I feel like, yeah, I mean, it's just part of this long lineage of exploiting black people and then telling them that their features were exploiting them for are not desirable at large. Um. But Good also worked extensively with Grace Jones and they were actually in a romantic relationship at the time, and he's responsible for the iconic cover of her record Island Life, in which she's doing this incredible balancing pose that is I'm sure someone can pull it off now, but it looks deeply unnatural and he used like magazine collage cut up techniques to depict that, and Nicki Minaje, who will come up again later referenced that exact cover in her video for Stupid ho. Uh. So there's a complicated lineage there, which we're not going to necessarily. This is not my graduate dissertation, so I'm not going to unpack all of that. But getting back on track, it was Good's work that inspired the shape of the fifty foot ass, which was made out of pencil steel, which is what aircraft frames are made of, and fiberglass. And when Mix a Lot arrived on set and was confronted by the site of this giant fifty ft fiberglass ass, he was quite understandably dumb struck. Mix was asked to recall the moment in a Reddit a m A and he replied, quote one word surreal. Remember now, I'm a brother from Seattle. So I walked into this place and there was a forty five paper machee ass in the middle of the room. First thing, second thing, The director told me, you're going to go on top of the ass and you're gonna wrap from there. So I tried to stand on the left cheek. That didn't work. I tried standing on the right cheek. That didn't work. So I stood in the crack delivering the song from up there, and I was wearing all brown. I was like a dancing turd, you know, in another interview, he would say, my boys said, you're always talking like you're the ship. Well now you really are the ship. They still ride me on that. Uh. Mis ultimately changed out of the brown outfit, but that was not even the only wardrobe drama on this set. Yes, after his hours of careful consideration selecting models for this shoot, Mix was dissatisfied with their costumes, which he considered too risk gay and in his eyes, catered too much to the Caucasian gaze. As he later said in The Vulture Oral History, what really bothered me was that the main girl sitting on the pedestal at the beginning of the song had on a blonde wig, tiger shorts, a bunch of gold chains, a cheapass satin gown, and ugly lipstick. She looked like these are his words? Oh, I thought, what the hell is this? Although he added to be honest, if I saw her on the street, I might say, what's up baby. I'm glad that he added that in there so that she wouldn't take it personally if she was reading this, I guess um. So Mix took his complaints to the director, Adam Bernstein, saying the song is called baby Got back, not baby soho. They ended up getting new clothes for the model in question, a woman by the name Almond, who apparently was very grateful. I guess she really didn't like what she had been initially asked to wear. So it all worked out in the end, did it, though? Jordan's because One of the most iconic stories concerning the shoot of the Baby Got Back video is Dana Hollister. Costume designer Dana Hollister, who claimed the quote makes pooled a glock on me because I challenged the way he was dressed for art direction purposes and he freaked out on me. Now makes rebuke this claim, saying that's bullshit, before reportedly laughing up roariously. When he regained his composure, he continued, quote, there is no way I would travel across state lines into California with those gun laws. Pulling a gun on a guy is enough of a punk move, but a woman. Hollister then walked back the incident, saying that it lasted quote all of two minutes. He realized that we had his best interests at heart. He is a lovely guy. Now, Dana Hollister sidebar, she's the costume designer on the shoot, and she later became a famous restaurant tour and she owned the former convent in l A's Silver Lake district that Katie Perry once tried to buy. The reader's digest version of this story is that there was a dispute over who had the right to sell this content. The archdiocese or the group of nuns in the archdiocese agreed to sell the place to Perry for fourteen five mill, but shortly afterward, Dana Hollister struck a deal to buy the home for fifteen five mill from the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who claimed they had the right to sell the property. This legal battle took years, during which one nun died in the middle of court. After getting a ruling, Olister was forced to pay six point five million in damages. Sorry back, got a little in the weeds, But back to the release of Maybe Got Back. This was prime video era when MTV ruled the land, and in an attempt to get the TV network on board, Rick Reuben commissioned old fashioned and grave desk plaques that read call MTV re Sir mix a lot and left them left them on the desks of every staff member at his office. That's just a helpful little reminder. But unfortunately MTV was not happy with this bountiful display of booty and banned the video and for the mix camp. This was just a golden opportunity, the perfect way to transform the ass anthem into a cause celebra if you are killing it with the alliteration, thank you, thank this this episode. By the way, everyone please please tweet at attention. I mean this is it is the Barber streisand effect. You remember that we didn't she like, Oh, I sure do. Long story short, it was like a real estate thing that she wanted to, uh put up a bunch of mansions and okay, So the California Coastal Records Project, they were taking photographs across the California coastline to document coastal erosion, and uh, she sued the photographers for violation of privacy. She sued them for fifty million dollars because she wanted to remove an aerial photograph of the mansion from the publicly available collection of twelve thousand California coastline photographs. So this is a photography project aimed at environmental concerns. There's one photo in twelve thousand, and she sues him for fifty million. Oh and this is great. Before she filed her lawsuit, the image of her house, image thirty eight fifty, had been downloaded from the website only six times, to two of those were from her attorneys. So as a result of the case, public knowledge of this picture increased greatly, and more than four twenty thousand people visited this site over the following month. The lawsuit was dismissed and she was forced to pay his legal the photographer's legal fees, which amounted to a hundred and fifty five thousand dollars. And that, in a nutshell is the stries and effect. The more you try and suppress something, the more it comes out in the wash. Yes, And that's kind of in a sense what happened with the Baby Got Back video. Mix who assumed the network would never play the video in the first place. He wasn't really all that bothered, and he loved the controversy, and he likened it to the controversy surrounding Elvis when he appeared on early TV shows like Ed Sullivan and he was filmed above the waist because his wiggling hips were just too hot for network sensors. He was quoted as saying, all of a sudden, Baby Got Back, went from being the song you got sick of on the radio to being pushed out of the system. He was a rebel. Uh. It was no longer just a novelty. It wasn't cute, it wasn't simple. Somebody didn't like it, he said. And again this is controversy is so great, just gets more attention. Uh. In the past, MTV had refused to air songs like NWA straight out of Compton, which said it promoted violence. Um. But the network always got skittish when the word banned was used. The programmer at MTV, a woman by the name of Patty Galoozy, explained her position in the Vulture or History. She said, people like to use the word band. You can be righteous, as if MTV is banning books. But banning is not the same as a programming decision with respect to a video that directly flouted a then recently instituted rule against showing female body parts with no reference to a face, which makes sense. We were trying to move away from MTV's recent past, when videos showing slices of pie would drop into a girl's lap like in Warrants Cherry Pie, and these videos were shown around the clock. So okay, a good policy there that that makes sense. Um, But Sir Mix took a very active role in trying to get his video on MTV, much as Harrison Ford did on Air Force. One one of the many ways that they're like, Sir Mix a lot crashed at dinner with the aforementioned MTV executive Patty Gluzy, and he pled his case as to why the video was important and deserved to be seen, and finally MTV eventually caved after some minor edits and re cuts, uh, and they agreed to play the video after the nine pm watershed as they had with Shares if I could turn back time, which was slightly controversial because she's dancing on a battleship in a g string for some reason, because she's fine, Share you hide bound Clode poll that was supposed to be delivered in orson Welles impression. I just got too angry that you've slandered my beloved Share and having said all that, we'll be right back with more too much information right after this. Incidentally, this is now the second time that a giant ass figures into God. I don't know what you call this the narrative? What would we call this a saga? Saga s mix? Yeah? Absolutely, If you got a sir in your name, you deserve a saga. Okay, I'll allow it. Well either way, this is the second time a giant ass appears in the Baby Goutbacks saga. Um. I don't know. There's no way to even gracefully slide into this. They made a giant inflatable ass. That's pretty glad, that's graceful. Mix A lot was hated to fly. He was afraid to fly, and because he had to drive everywhere, he wasn't able to play as many tour dates as his label would have liked. So as a workaround, I hope this was Rick Rubin's idea, but it probably wasn't. They decided that they would tour a thirty foot lifelike inflatable ass instead, and uh to bring this into the realm of Elvis once again. This was not unlike the time that the colonel towards Elvis's gold plated caddy around in place of the actual artist. So I guess there's a precedent. One of the many ways that sir mixes like Elvis. They put this inflatable ass on top of record stores and radio stations or just in the parking lot, and then they would just blast the song. They went one better doing a beach side record industry conference in Santa Monica. Because the organizers refused to allow the giant ass to be displayed, and indeed rudely rebuffed offers to have it clad with a similarly massive pair of bikini bottoms, Label Brass just rented a boat, docked it off the beach, and towed the giant ass behind them while blasting Baby Got Back. Uh. It is visible in the background of a scene in Joel Schumacher's not the towing thing, but the giant ass itself. Joel Schumacher's film Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas. You can see the ass on top of Virgin Record store on sunset. So it's been immortalized for all eternity and in our hearts. Yeah and his goofy is all of this actually sounds. Music historian Dan Charnas cites this as among the moments that rap fully crossed over into pop in a book called The Big Payback, The History of the Business of Hip Hop, but Sadly, what big gass goes up must come down. The big ass was a target for local vandals and angry neighbors, and it was frequently shot with bullets and arrows, which like, who in l A is rolling around with a bow and arrow? Whatever? Uh, disgruntled extras on terrible Western sets. Maybe yeah, immersiveully A spare giant inflatable ass was made a decoy or dummy ass if you will, much like Air Force one. Uh. And enduring one of these apparently scarily frequent incidents, Deaf American put out a press release that read, in part, this shocking and senseless incident will not affect plans for the butt Balloon to continue on its current national tour of record store rooftops. Rick Rubin, owner of American Recordings, has posted a ward for anyone with information leading to the capture and conviction of the butt assassinator. There are some real sick people in this world, Ruben said. They commented, I want you know what I want next from HBO or Hulu or whatever. I guess Netflix is dropping a lot of the originals, but whoever is making a niche music limited prestige series for a streamer? I wanted to be about the saga of the inflatable ass, and whether or not Bill Simmons and where Yeah an investigative podcast, and whether or not Rick Rubin's reward successfully resulted in the apprehending of the men who shot Sir mix Lots giant inflatable ass. I'm just singing this like to the tune of the man who shot Liberty, who shot Sir mix A Lost Giants, the sheriff shot shot the ass. To be fair, if you're eleventeen and you're driving around and you see in like a place that's like not a major city, but like some you know, just somewhere out of the way where there's not a lot to do, and you you see a giant inflatable but I mean the temptation to shoot it. I can I can sort of understand that. Oh yeah, I mean it's I would have done it. Are you kidding me? If I was like an eighteen year old kid or like off school at this time, I would have made my life's mission to come after that mass. A boy from the bottom to the top is how Jordan titled this next one. So that's what we're sticking with. You all need to know that for all of the indignities endured by this giant inflatable but not to mention all the backlash with the video. The song proved to be an enormous success. It was released in May and spent five weeks at number one that July, and Mix learned about the honor while on stage at a gig in Panama City, and he reportedly thought he was being pranked, which is cute. Ultimately, it went on to become the second best selling song in the United States in behind Only Boys Two Men's End of the Road, and Baby Got Back spent seven months on the Billboard Hot one hundred, and it went double platinum just three months after its release, sold a hundred and forty five thousand copies in a single week and one a Grammy for Best Solo Rap Performance, and it went on the spark a brief trend of butt related rap songs, most notably Rex and Effects rump Shaker, which you mentioned earlier. And Mix said in a two thousand fourteen Redditt a m a that his favorite butt related song was back That Acts Up by Juvenile So Nicely Down Juvenile Um. Baby Got Back was parodied by Jamie Foxx on in Living Color, in which he stars as Trail Mix a lot, singing a song called Baby's Got Snaps a very specific garbage. A slightly better one was that it was also parodied in an episode of Bill Ny the Science Guys, an episode about buoyancy and I think Sir Mix actually appeared on this and did a song called Bill's Got Vote excellent. Uh, And now we're gonna run down some of the ways that Sir Mix has. You know, the man is nothing if not canny, and he clearly loves money as we all do, and has just licensed this song out to anyone and everyone who can afford it. And Jordan, why don't give us a rundown on who that actually is. Yeah, it's pretty incredible that for all the controversy that this truck generated, but it was released. It just was used to sell so many things. Uh. In two thousand five, it was used at a back to school commercial for Target, with the lyrics change to baby Got Backpack, which is pretty good. The opening line is we like backpacks and we cannot lie with a cell phone pocket on the side. That last part is kind of terrible, but baby Got Backpack that's pretty good. Um. At a Washington Mutual Company Retreat. In two thousand six, lenders sang a version that featured the lyrics this is also pretty good. I like big Bucks and I cannot lie you mortgage brothers can't deny, while performers tossed play money into the crowd. I both love and hate that. Yeah. Yeah, that's because it wasn't like the wasn't all the bank bailouts like two years later yep uh. In two thousand nine, Burger King used the song in an ad promoting the SpongeBob SquarePants toys that were included in their kids meals. The opener is you could probably guess this. I like square butts and I cannot lie, And the clip ends with Sir mix a Lot in the background nodding his approval again for mixed stands for body positivity, big butts, small butts, even square butts. Ah, this is probably to me the strangest Delta Airlines. On July, Elta Airlines tweeted a photo of the back of a seven thirty seven plane with the caption baby cut back, we like big jets and we cannot lie. The seven thirty seven is ready to fly. I mean, was there? Social media manager high. I cannot imagine making the connection between sir mix a lot and the back of an airplane, which from the back I would imagine planes kind of all looked roughly the same. I mean, this is this is the length. This is when corporate Twitter started being weird and like it was like when Wendy's Wendy's started snapping back at people and that so on and so forth. So they were like, let's get some of that traffic. Uh, let's do a weird butt plane. Uh. This brings us. It's just from weird butt plane. This brings us to Sarah Palin. In Sarah Palin performed the song on Fox's The Masks singer well dressed as a bear. This was right in the early days of the pandemic, and in an article about this performance by Dave Holmes appeared in Esquire. It included this apt line. I have thought a lot about doomsday scenarios in my many decades on this planet, but I have to say I did not expect the apocalypse to be this tacky. He's right, the darkest days of the pandemic made even darker. Um and it baby got back again. This blows my mind for considering how controversial initially was appeared in so many kids movies two thousand four Scooby Doo Two Monsters Unleashed, two thousand ten movie Yogi Bear. Cameron Diaz dances to this in the movie Charlie's Angels, and it's been used also in Happy Feet. Jack asked the movie Shrek and Shark's Tail, Oh and Friends, I forgot, uh, Ross sings it to their baby to try to make it laugh. How could I forget? But perhaps the most controversial use of this song occurred in episode of Glee that aired in January two thirteen. It got a little weird. Not just the fact that they had a high school glee club of mostly white kids covering Baby Got Back Let's Hate lely Uh, it got weird because their version of the song featured an acoustic backing track that sounded very much like it was taken directly from a two thousive cover by a singer songwriter named Jonathan Colton. Colton's theory was that they just ripped the acoustic backing from his original recording and let the Glee cast sing over it. I don't think that there was ever it was ever determined whether or not they took his guitar performance wholesale or simply paid one of their musicians to turn in a stunning simulacrum of it. But they definitely took his arrangements and some of the new elements of melody that he added in his version. And then when Colton complained to the Glee producers because the people involved in this show were uniformly garbage, he was told that they were within their legal rights to do this and that he should be happy for the exposure. Oh that's that last part. That's even though they didn't credit him and didn't even publicly acknowledge that it's his version. You should be happy for the exposure, which we will also not give you. God, I hate all all those people, so that's all a bummer. But dio my bile back, because this is a funnier and at least and moderately more innocent version of this. Uh. Sometime in the early tens, a young law student named Jonathan Nichols purchased a new cell phone, and before long he started getting texts from strange numbers that were sending him synth clips on YouTube or unsolicited bikini photos, and he was getting calls from luxury car dealers like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Jaguar, and they kept asking if Mr Anthony Ray would like to come on by and take their cars for a test drive. And then a random day in August, his phone blew up with text wishing him a happy birthday. It was not his birthday. Finally he put it together, Anthony Ray was Sir Mix a lot, Sir Mix a lot, Well, Anthony Ray, it was Mix's birthday. His new phone had Sir Mixes old number. When Mix was informed to this, he responded with are you serious? That is hilarious, poor fellow, but he felt like he truly felt like king for a day. He should have he should have taken the Ferrari dealership up and just like, yeah, I'll drive it. And they don't want to call his bluff of being like you're not Sir Mix a lot. Just see who blinks first. I think he did text them back. I was like, I'm a poor law student, but sure, I love that story so much. Yes, Sir Mix has a pretty good sense of humor about his lot in life. In he performed a version of Baby Got Back with the Seattle Symphony and they're a very famous composer. Who is this, huckle Well, it's the kid or the grandson of Sergei Profokey. Oh God, Sergey Prokofiev. That's why threw Yeah. So Gabriel prokofy of is his grandson, but his granddad is one of the most famous composers of all time, largely in Russia but also over here. He did Peter and the Wolf, which is like one of the first pieces of orchestral symphonic music that most kids get exposed to and they're like elementary school music class um. He also did a great many other works. So, yeah, this guy was invited to compose an orchestral piece based on one of Seattle's musical icons. Could have chosen Jimmy Hendrix, could have chosen Kurt Kobe, which chosen so many people. He chose Sir Mix a lot, and they did this orchestral version of Baby Got Back, which is just tremendous. Uh. Sir Mix also teams with fellow Seattle icons Mud Honey for a song on the Judgment Night soundtrack, which is actually a hugely important soundtrack because it was like really one of the first times that they like. The whole thing is they brought grunge and rock guys together with hip hop artists, and basically it's kind of like conceptual ground zero for rap rock, proceed by Public Enemy and Anthrax doing Bring the Noise. Yeah, but um yeah, no One Aerosmith and well we don't talk about that. Um yeah. Judgment Night Is is actually a hugely inframential soundtrack. It's very interesting. I gotta check that out. And speaking of nineties uh, not grunge bands, but nineties bands. Mix had started a short lived group with members of the presidents of the United States of America of Peaches fame, you know, going to the Country. Yeah, um, but I guess they split up before they ever actually released anything, which is sad. I remain unclear about whether or not this was a real musical venture or just a press ploy. But Sir Mix is still out there performing and in recent years he crafted a ten minute version A Baby Got Back that he plays to audiences that he deems are into it, so he only plays it to especially intentive audience as a guest. Um, oh, it all seems pretty good to be Sir Mix a lot. Speaking to Cosmo in he said every reality TV show that to me to be on I turned down. They keep looking for a train wreck and my life is not a train wreck, and I know they wanted to be. The perception is this guy can't have money, but I will fake it to give him the train wreck they want and basically ruined my career. And he's right. Mix owns the publishing two Baby Got Back, and as we saw, he licenses it out every chance he can, TVs, movies, ads, samples, and Nicki Minaj is Anaconda song, et cetera, which means that the song is so far yielded over a hundred million dollars. I'm unclear how much that went to him, but presumably a decent cut. So as a result, Sir Mix a lot doesn't feel the need to release albums, but he's still active in the studio on occasion um but apparently because he doesn't need the money, he records music that he deems has integrity. That's his quote of his most famous creation. Mix believes Baby Got Back would not make the same sort of splash that it did in the nineties because the conversation around representation, body image, and body positivity has changed, you know, for the better now, he says, because the body is not only accepted, it's expected. I'm not sure that song would make the same impact as it did in two, which is arguably like that. That's great, you know, I'm glad he took the outrage, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I'm glad he took all of that on literal arrows in this case. I'm glad he did that for all of us because it is an inarguable touchstone in changing body standards. You know, it's high falutin moral impact, maybe somewhat deluded by it's light ubiquity. Ubiquity, yes, or I was going to say the chin inflatable ass or the number of corporations that have lined up to co opt it, but we can't take that away from Mix. Well, folks, we have reached the end of this episode. We have gotten to the bottom of the matter, and now it's time to put this behind us. Not even a chuckle, no, just now, uh well, any any final thoughts for us? No, I just want to hear that presidents the United States collaboration MIX if you're out there well, and that Prestige series about the attack on the inflatable ask if they ever find the guy who did it, and someone collected Rick Ruben's cash reward. So if anyone Hulu preferably HBO you want to contact us about that, you know you can reach out. I'll take a meeting. Um tweet at us at ass alliteration. Thanks for listening, folks, this has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Runtug and we'll see you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows