More on “I like big BOOKS and I cannot lie”

7 May 2008 | Culture, Internet, Community, Media | Comments

Note: this is a continuation of my last post.

Digging into this image:

The joke hinges on a simple substitution of the word “books” for “butts,” but that substitution creates a collision of two opposite sensibilities. Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song is about a public, joyous, Rabelaisian and loudly-proclaimed love of the bodily and sensual– complete with dancing and lots of movement. Mix-A-Lot uses precise Anglo diction (how many urban black guys say “fellas” without it being satirical) and a battery of witty rhymes and puns (Honda, Fonda and Anaconda) to mark out a black aesthetic as profoundly different than that of the white mainstream media. (The music video makes this point even more clear.)

From public, bodily and sensual we move with the change of one word to private, still and cerebral. Rather than raucously celebrating the butt in a song performed out loud, the t-shirt stands on the wearer’s chest to be read and appreciated in silence… a different sort of wit.

You don’t need to know Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song closely in order to get the joke– a passing memory of the title conveys most of it. However, if your memories are at all clear then each recollected detail increases your awareness of this sensibility collision.

Sir Mix-A-Lot’s song came out in 1992, before the internet had extended much beyond college campuses and the government, before Napster took apart the music industry and while the television industry was starting to recover from the first fragmentation of media that happened with the birth of cable. As the Wikipedia editor notes, the song has been covered and parodied many times.

One of the most memorable performances, or at least the one that was seen by the most people, is when the Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy, who himself had a 1985 Rick James produced hit single in “Party All the Time”) briefly sings the song at the end of the first “Shrek” movie (2001).

Had Sir Mix-A-Lot released “Baby Got Back” much later than 1992, then the joke of the t-shirt would have failed, and this is where I’ll continue tomorrow.