Actress Blake Lively got in a fair amount of hot water for a recent Instagram post of her wearing a fancy dress that hugged her curves, featuring the caption “L.A. face with an Oakland booty,” a line from Sir Mix-a-Lot’s seminal ode to big butts, “Baby Got Back.” Lively quickly found herself at the sharp end of a lot of controversy and ire, mostly coming from those who claimed she was being “disrespectful” to black women with the use of that lyric. However, there is one prominent person on Lively’s side, and that’s Sir Mix-a-Lot himself.
Mix-a-Lot spoke, at length, about the controversy with The Hollywood Reporter, and the entire thing is worth a read. Seriously. While he may be the guy who once stood upon a gigantic butt in the video for his one hit, he’s actually a smart, observant person, and Sir Mix-a-Lot put a lot of thought into his answer.
In short, Mix-a-Lot’s song was never about race, but merely about his desire for different standards of beauty to be acknowledged:
“So I wrote this song not as a battle between the races. I wrote the song because I wanted Cosmopolitan, I wanted all these big magazines to kind of open up a little bit and say, ‘Wait a minute, this may not be the only beautiful.’ I mean, I don’t look at Serena Williams as fat. I don’t think she has an ounce of fat anywhere on her. I didn’t want there to be one voice. I wanted to say, ‘Hey, us over here! What we feel like is this.’”
He concludes his thoughts by saying, “That song was written with African-American women in mind, but trust me when I tell you that there are women out there with those curves everywhere, and they were once considered fat. And that’s what the song was about. It wasn’t about some race battle.” So there you have it. Sir Mix-a-Lot, the preeminent scholar of an L.A. face and an Oakland booty, is fine with Blake Lively’s Instagram post. Perhaps, with his blessing, the internet will call off their dogs.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
