Booty Rhapsody

Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.

If you need further proof of the axiom “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” I suggest you search out Check On It, the new single from Beyoncé. The video, which alternates between shots of Beyoncé and a verklempt-looking Steve Martin in a policeman’s get-up, provides advance warning for the remake of The Pink Panther. The lyrics, meanwhile, address a topic that no doubt gets a lot of attention in locker rooms and internet chat forums: Beyoncé’s rump.

With its grating chorus and mechanical beat, Check On It is dreadfully silly even by pop standards. All the same, it belongs to a long-standing — if little-studied — tradition in music. Salt-N-Pepa once sang, “You’re packed and you’re stacked, ’specially in the back / Brother, wanna thank your mother for a butt like that,” but their appreciation of the male anatomy was an exception, not the rule. From the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s It Must Be Jelly (’Cause Jam Don’t Shake Like That) to Sisqo’s Thong Song, the female behind has been one of pop music’s abiding obsessions.

How exactly did we get here? In the absence of scholarly research, one must rely on reasoned assumptions. Assumption No. 1: Throughout history, most popular secular music — from Medieval balladry to Wagnerian opera to gangsta rap — has been about sex (or its cousin, longing). Assumption No. 2: Given the long legacy of sexism, most musicians have been male. Assumption No. 3: Men enjoy waxing eloquent about the female form. Assumption No. 4: A woman’s derriere, at least in Western society, is seen as a more wholesome, less politicized object of (ahem) study than some of her other parts. A song about the vagina would not get mainstream radio play (unless it was a novelty hit in the female voice, as in the case of Fannypack’s Cameltoe). “Bum” is one of the first things a child learns to say; its mere utterance is a source of humour for people of all ages. As a result, a male pop star who sings about a woman’s caboose is seen as cheeky (sorry), not a little horny, but for the most part non-threatening.

While there’s no consensus on the first mention of the female bottom in song, it’s fair to assume — again — that it was a subtle reference befitting the social mores of the day. Not until the 1970s did the fixation become truly obvious, thanks to songs like Jimmy Castor’s novelty hit Bertha Butt Boogie (from the album Butt of Course) and Queen’s super-sized stadium rocker Fat Bottomed Girls. In the mid-’80s, experimentations with hip hop in Miami gave rise to an electro-influenced, sexually explicit style called booty bass; while songs like Poison Clan’s Shake Watcha Mama Gave Ya were too misogynistic to attain mainstream popularity, booty bass marked the first time the female bottom earned its own musical genre.

Ready for that jelly: Beyoncé Knowles. Photo Jo Hale/Getty Images.

If anything has changed between the release of Elmore James’s Shake Your Moneymaker (1961) and Mystikal’s Shake Ya Ass (2000), it’s that rump lovers have become more brazen. Singers still have great fun inventing euphemisms, but they’re no longer a means to dodge the censors. In the 1963 single Shake a Tail Feather, the Five Du-Tones crooned, “Bend over and let me see you shake your tail feather.” The song caused a small stir in its day, but seems risibly timid compared to Nelly’s 2003 single Shake Ya Tailfeather, in which the St. Louis rapper opined, “Look here momma you’re dead wrong for having them pants on / Capri’s cut low so when you shake it I see your thong.” (Romance, thy name is Nelly.)

Music videos have undoubtedly vulgarized the coy tone of those early odes. The prominence of booty in rap videos is often cited as the pinnacle of female degradation; the truth is, cock rockers like Van Halen and Aerosmith have done just as much to further this dubious cause.

Sir Mix-A-Lot, author of the 1991 song Baby Got Back, is often lauded as the godfather of booty rap. Catchy as hell, Sir Mix-A-Lot’s biggest hit also goes a long way in articulating why some African-American men find a large behind attractive, why the image is so prominent in hip-hop videos and why acknowledging it is (almost) an act of defiance: “I’m tired of magazines / Sayin’ flat butts are the thing / Take your average black man and ask him that / She gotta pack much back.”

Given the ever-growing presence of women — not to mention self-awareness — in pop music, it was inevitable that a female singer would take men to task for decades of wanton objectification. Destiny’s Child’s Bootylicious (2000) — arguably the first song to tell the girl’s side of the story — was not exactly a feminist rebuke. “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly / ’cause my body’s too bootylicious for ya, babe,” goes the chorus, less a lecture than a tease. The Black Eyed Peas’ insidious My Humps (which qualifies here because it’s mostly sung by Fergie, the group’s female member) ups the ante considerably, tilting into the realm of too much information. (“Mix your milk with my cocoa puff, milky, milky riiiiiiight.”)

If male artists rhapsodize about the desirability of the female bottom, Beyoncé’s Check On It confirms that desirability (“Ohh boy you looking like you like what you see / Won’t you come over check up on it”), with the proviso that only a special man (read: Jay-Z) need apply: “You can look at it, as long as you don’t grab it / If you don’t go braggin’, I’ma let you have it.”

The feminine response can either be seen as progressive, as women reclaim their own bodies, or a sleazy acknowledgement that the many decades of male obsession have been entirely warranted (and should continue apace). It’s hard to know for sure. Artists like Madonna and Missy Elliott convey an obvious message of female strength; with Beyoncé and the Black Eyed Peas’ Fergie, the line between empowerment and exploitation is less defined. Either way, the adoration is unlikely to abate. Consciously or not, most bum devotees would probably agree with the sentiment in Spinal Tap’s classic Big Bottom: “Big bottom drive me out of my mind / How could I leave this behind?”

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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