Did Sir Mix-a-Lot invent the country-rap genre six years before ‘Baby Got Back’?
There was about a 20-year period in America when any dull small-talk conversation with an office co-worker about their music taste usually resulted in one of three declarative statements: ‘I only listen to country’, ‘I only listen to hip-hop‘, or ‘I like pretty much everything except country and hip-hop’.
Those backwards days are long gone now, of course, as the old sonic bigotries of the past fade away and the Berlin Wall of genre collapses, leaving us only with whatever pop music currently is. Rap stars and country stars are arguably both in shorter supply than they’ve been in decades, but the sounds of their ugly step-children are everywhere, as the once ridiculed novelty known as ‘country-rap’ has essentially become the default sound of most Radio 1 / Kiss FM programming.
You might not be an avid listener of Shaboozey, Morgan Wallen, or Jelly Roll, but you probably bopped your head to Beyoncé’s country record last year. You probably also felt that tectonic plate shift back in 2018 when every young person you knew seemed to be obsessed with Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ and Billy Ray Cyrus was somehow involved, which was confusing and frightening.
Millennials thought this cowboy rap experiment had proven unsuccessful after the rise and fall of Bubba Sparxxx a quarter century ago, but no; this inevitable mashup was never going to be denied. It has been testing the proverbial paddock gates for weakness since way back in the day, with country singers spitting proto rhymes under their breath and MCs covertly testing out their yee-has.
Some could argue that Charlie Daniels’ ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia’ in 1979 was an early entry into the category, or Parliament’s ‘Lil Ole Country Boy’ a decade before that, but in terms of pinpointing a popular crossover single that came along after the mainstream breakthrough of hip-hop in the 1980s, you could easily nominate as ‘Patient Zero’ the same artist unfairly known to most as a ‘90s one-hit-wonder.
Back in 1986, Seattle-based MC Sir Mix-a-Lot released the single ‘Square Dance Rap’, a comedic club track that wasn’t so much embracing cowboy music as mocking it. Nonetheless, the frontier was being crossed, and people unironically liked what they heard, as ‘Square Dance Rap’ established Mix-a-Lot as a major name in rap among people who actually listened to rap. This was a full six years before ‘Baby Got Back’ introduced him to the rest of the world.
Independently released two years before his debut studio album, Mix-a-Lot’s original version of ‘Square Dance Rap’ was created by recording his vocals very slowly on a four-track tape machine, then speeding them up in post-production, Chipmunks style, to create a high-pitched redneck MC persona, spouter of such hilarious venom as “Glen Campbell can’t hang with this / All you freaks, give your man a kiss”, or “Mix-A-Lot reigns on the drum machine / The bass line playing is oh, so mean / Throw your partner across your thigh / Tickle her fancy, until she starts to cry”.
The song quickly blew up on Los Angeles’s influential K-DAY radio, becoming its most requested track for over a month. Along with putting Sir Mix-a-Lot and country-rap on the map, it also did the same for Seattle, a good five years before Nirvana and Pearl Jam took off. When he performed in the UK for the first time shortly after ‘Square Dance Rap’ came out, as part of a Wembley Arena festival with the likes of Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, his unique inclusion of the rural with the urban sent the unsuspecting Britons into a frenzy thinking they had heard the future.
Then again, “They love anything American over there,” Sir Mix-a-Lot told the Rocket newspaper in Seattle after the London gig, “anything authentic American. If you even said hello without a British accent, they went crazy. But I made a point to tell them I’m not from the Bronx. I’m from Seattle, Washington.” Seattle: birthplace of grunge, Starbucks, and apparently, country-rap.
