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Sir Mix-A-Lot on 'Baby Got Back,' The Song of The Summer 25 Years Ago

‘Oh, my goodness! That’s one of my heroes.’

When up-and-coming cartoonist Keef Knight has a traumatic run-in with the police, he begins to see the world in an entirely new way.

When Sir Mix-A-Lot recorded “Baby Got Back” for his third studio album in 1992, he didn’t believe it had hit potential. “I thought that it was more of a filler,” recalls the 53-year-old, born Anthony Ray. Co-produced with Rick Rubin and released as a single that May, “Baby Got Back” lasted five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was officially declared that year’s Song of the Summer. Mix reflects on how the song came to fruition, and how to craft a summer smash that lasts.

“I got a call from Heidi Robinson, who did PR for Def American Recordings. When she [mentioned] Rick Rubin, I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness! That’s one of my heroes.’ I jumped on a plane and met with him -- we went to this weird restaurant where Rick was eating this green pasta. I had never seen pesto. He tells me about one song in particular of mine that he liked that never hit, [1989’s] ‘I Got Game.’ We went through the whole negotiating process, and once that got worked out, the creative stuff started.

 

     
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“I would send him songs and he would write notes and fax them back to me. I took ‘I Got Game’ and used the same sounds. ‘Baby Got Back’ was originally supposed to be a slow, serious song, and that sucked. That didn’t even raise Rick’s eyebrows. So I sped it up and did it again. When I sent it back to him, he put an exclamation point behind one of his comments and wanted me to take the music out [during] the punchlines, because that’s what was going to last forever. Boy, was he right.

“When I released it, gangsta rap was pretty big. I wasn’t talking about shooting or killing nobody. I was just talking about something we all could agree on, or at least most of us. It’s a little harder now to make something sticky. ‘Baby Got Back’ is a brand unto itself. I used to not want to accept that, but ‘Baby Got Back’ is bigger than Sir Mix-A-Lot.”

This article originally appeared in the June 3 issue of Billboard.

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