Sir Mix-a-Lot: Everyone's overreacting to Blake Lively's 'Oakland booty' Instagram

Blake Lively probably didn't think her Instagram photo quoting "Baby Got Back" would have the Internet yelling at her, calling her racially insensitive and telling her to delete her account entirely. 

Sir Mix-a-Lot, the man behind the now-infamous "L.A. face with an Oakland booty" line, was a little surprised, too.

Earlier this week, Lively posted a red carpet photo with the caption, "L.A. face with an Oakland booty" and got a lot of backlash, with one Twitter user saying she was "using WOC's bodies as a punchline and commodity."

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Sir Mix-a-Lot doesn't seem to see it that way, writing in The Hollywood Reporter that while "Baby Got Back" was "written with African-American women in mind," it was meant to embrace beauty in different sizes, across all races.

"A friend of mine, he said, 'Dude, I know Katy Perry did this, one of the Kardashians did this, but I don’t understand, what did this girl do to make everybody pissed off?' So I checked it out, and looked at it and I was kind of … I liked it," he wrote. "You know, I like stuff like that, but I was a little surprised at the criticism."

Indeed, Katy Perry once tweeted the lyric in 2012. Khloe Kardashian used it in an Instagram photo last year. Apparently, Miley Cyrus -- who has more of a Pilates booty -- used to use it in her Instagram bio. 

Sir Mix-a-Lot went on to describe why he wrote the earworm in the first place.

So I wrote “Baby Got Back,” not to say which race is prettier — which is silly, because there were white women with the same curves that were told that they were fat, too. There were people that were actually saying that Marilyn Monroe looked bad. They didn’t say that at her peak, obviously, they said it later on.

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.”

What I meant by “L.A.” was Hollywood. In other words, makeup or whatever it took to make that face look good, they do it in L.A. But, as much as you can throw makeup on something, you can’t make up the butt. That’s what L.A. face and Oakland booty meant. You can put makeup on that face and make it look beautiful but a butt is a butt, a body is a body.

I think she’s saying, “I’ve got that Oakland booty” or “I’m trying to get it.” I think we have to be careful what we wish for as African-Americans, because if you say she doesn’t have the right to say that, then how do you expect her to at the same time embrace your beauty? I mean, I don’t get it. I think it’s almost a nod of approval, and that was what I wanted. I wanted our idea of beautiful to be accepted. I think not only now is it accepted, but it’s expected.

That’s my thing, I’m not telling people what they can like and not like. 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.

Read the rest of his comments at The Hollywood Reporter.

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