"Baby Got Back"
"Oh, my God, Becky — look at her butt." Sir Mix-a-Lot's anthem to big butts spent five weeks at number one, got briefly banned by MTV, won a Grammy, and never once left the party playlist.
Seattle rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot released "Baby Got Back" in May 1992 as the second single from his album Mack Daddy, built on a sample of the Detroit techno track "Technicolor" and opening with an instantly quotable valley-girl monologue. The Adam Bernstein-directed video, with its dancers atop a giant sculpted posterior, was briefly banned by MTV for its blatant celebration of exactly what the title promised.
The ban did what bans do. "Baby Got Back" spent five weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1992 and finished as the year's second best-selling song in the US — on Billboard's year-end chart, only Boyz II Men's "End of the Road" ranked higher. It won the 1993 Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance. And beneath the jokes, Mix-a-Lot insisted the song had a thesis: it pushed back on the skinny-model beauty standard of the era — "silicone parts are made for toys" — and celebrated bodies that magazines like Cosmo were telling women to shrink. Critics at the time noticed the message; millions of people mostly noticed it was impossible not to dance to.
The afterlife has been endless: wedding receptions, movie soundtracks, commercials, VH1 crowning it both a greatest song of the 90s and the decade's number-one one-hit wonder, and Nicki Minaj rebuilding it wholesale into "Anaconda" in 2014. Not bad for a song your mom pretended to hate and knew every word of.
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