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Ladies And Gentlemen, Silence Please, For Sir Mix-A-Lot

Sir Mix-a-Lot and the Seattle Symphony performed his hit "Baby Got Back" amid energetic audience participation Saturday night.
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Sir Mix-a-Lot and the Seattle Symphony performed his hit "Baby Got Back" amid energetic audience participation Saturday night.

Violinists were nodding their heads to a different beat this weekend, as Sir Mix-a-Lot and the Seattle Symphony presented what the rapper called "Orchestral Movements from the Hood Night." Their version of the hit "Baby Got Back" drew a large crowd of dancers to the stage.

The rapper delivered his ode to curvaceousness in a Saturday night performance in which women attending the event came onstage to dance — and to contribute the occasional lyric as Sir Mix-a-Lot shared the mic.

"Lord have mercy," Sir Mix-a-Lot said as the stage filled with people wanting to dance to an anthem that first became a hit in 1992.

There really isn't much else we can say.

The rapper performed two songs with the symphony, delivering a version of "Posse on Broadway" that was staid compared with the "Baby Got Back" performance.

The songs were arranged by composer Gabriel Prokofiev and performed by the orchestra led by conductor Ludovic Morlot, whom Sir Mix-a-lot lauded as "the shiznit."

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Bill Chappell is a writer and editor on the News Desk in the heart of NPR's newsroom in Washington, D.C.