This is the first President’s Day that I’ve had off from work in over six years. All this pent-up energy to give Washington and Lincoln their due accolades! But downpours of rain kept me inside most of the morning, watching old music videos like Sir Mixalot’s “Baby got Back” on YouTube and dancing around the apartment, shaking my healthy butt, reliving the glory days with what I believe history will judge to be the defining song of 1992: “Oh my God, Becky! Look at her butt! It is so big.”
The Ivory Coast is currently experiencing something resembling a “Baby got Back” craze with the song “Bobaraba,” which translates to “big bottom.” The video for “Bobaraba” features endless footage of Africans, men and women, shaking their butts in the camera (here for YouTube). According to the BBC, the song’s popularity has “spawned a black market in treatments claiming to increase one’s bottom size” (here), including bottom-enhancing injections and topical creams of questionable value and safety.
Didn’t the obesity “epidemic” begin around the early 1990s? Scores of books have been written about its causes and origins, but perhaps it can all be traced back to Sir Mixalot, himself a rather chubby little man, who gave women justification for ballooning their butts to be thick and juicy and unleashing an unconsciousness hunger for bottom-enhancing muffins, coffee drinks, and stuffed-crust pizza. “Baby got back! And sides! And front! And chins!”
