Fact-Check

Jennifer Lopez Couldn’t Have Inspired "Baby Got Back"

We’re on to you, Sir Mix-a-Lot.

By Matthew Halverson November 14, 2014

Fortunately Kim Kardashian failed in her quest to break the internet with those asstastic shots published by Paper magazine earlier this week. (Or, depending on how you felt about a fully functional internet keeping you from taking the rest of the week off, unfortunately.) But she may have fried a couple wires in a certain Seattle rapper’s brain.

See, Sir Mix-a-Lot, easily our favorite emcee, told TMZ yesterday that while Kim’s butt may be nice, he’s partial to Jennifer Lopez’s backside. In fact, he says he got so, uh, sprung watching J-Lo as a Fly Girl on In Living Color, that he wrote “Baby Got Back” for her.

It made for a great headline, but you know what? We’re not buying it. And here are our very scientific, thoroughly researched and peer-reviewed reasons for thinking Mix is trolling everyone.

After the second verse, the rump-loving rapper states, “When it comes to females, Cosmo ain’t got nothin’ to do with my selection. Thirty-six-24-36? Only if she’s five-three.” Healthyceleb.com, the Woodward and Bernstein of celebrity measurement reporting, states that J-Lo is 34-26-37. Okay, fine, she’s put on a few pounds since the early ’90s. But here’s the clincher: Lopez is five-five—a full two inches taller than the big-booty siren referenced in the song. That’s a fact that anyone watching a Fly Girls dance routine on a grainy, pre-HD television should have had no problem discerning.

In the third verse, Mix proclaims, “Give me a sista, I can’t resist her.” Do we really need to point out the discrepancy here?

• And finally, Lopez didn’t join In Living Color until September 1991. Mack Daddy, the album on which “Baby Got Back” appeared, was released on February 4, 1992. So if we’re to believe Mix, he saw J-Lo shaking it, shaking it, shaking that healthy butt on TV in September and then managed to write the greatest ode to derrieres of all time, record it, mix it, and add it to an album that still had to be pressed, distributed and marketed—all within five months? It’s…dubious.

So we’re calling you out, Anthony Ray: Either you produce notes, recorded conversation, love letters, or a scrapbook that incontrovertibly proves your claim that J-Lo inspired “Baby Got Back,” or we have no choice but to paraphrase the late Johnny Cochran: If the butt doesn’t fit, Mix must be full of shit. 

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