14. Sir Mix-A-Lot – Baby Got Back (1992)
Total Points – 358
Charts – 4
Top 40 – 1
Top 20 – 1
Top 10 – 0
Total Ranking – 12, 25, 42, 55, NR, NR
More social commentary than novelty song, Baby Got Back was Sir Mix-A-Lot’s (Anthony Ray) way of criticizing the mainstream interpretation of beauty. The song’s blatant sexual lyrics and especially the references to the female butt created a significant amount of controversy, which led MTV to briefly ban the song, and later to only play it after 9 PM. While the song unquestionably and directly addresses large butts, that’s not all it does. As Sir Mix-a-Lot stated “The song is talking about women who damn near kill themselves to try to look like these beanpole models that you see in Vogue magazine." He explains that most women respond positively to the song's message, especially black women: They all say, About time." The idea for the song came to Ray, who was tired of seeing the wafer-thin models on magazines and television, when he saw a Budweiser ad featuring 2 very thin, valley girl-esque models. Ultimately this led to Ray record the song in an effort to broaden the definition of beauty. The song was a #1 hit for 5 weeks and was the second best selling song of 1992, behind only Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road”. This song was ranked by VH1 as the 17th best hip hop song ever. Sir Mix-a-Lot had a couple other songs that made it into the bottom portion of the Hot 100, and he had a few songs that charted on the R&B/Hip Hop chart, but other than this single, none were Top 40 hits there either.