The first time I heard “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot, I was in the passenger’s seat of my dad’s new, used, forest green, anciently sturdy Volvo. He was driving, tapping the rhythm out on the steering wheel, his wrists spasming with each emphasis of the beat. As soon as the song had come on, he’d turned the volume up as high as he could without its hazard becoming more than a question, turned to me with a familiar childish grin, and said “Don’t tell your mom I let you listen to this!” which, of course made me excited. At the age of nine or ten, with parents as strict as mine, I wasn’t likely to hear such a warning again anytime soon. I didn’t recognize the intro, but as soon as it hit me with the signature “I LIKE. BIG. BUTTS and I cannot lie!” I knew what we were listening to. I had heard references to it, heard the line in movies and jokes and conversations, but, unlike the kids I went to school with, I’d never heard the actual song. It wasn’t what I had expected, but it was energetic, aggressive, and right now it was louder than any other song I’d ever heard my dad play.

He was singing every word, he was flicking his hand and his head in unison with each heavy drop or finalizing, shouted end of a line. I could see his teeth as he bellowed with Mix-a-Lot. He never consciously showed his teeth - they were really awful. He’d trained himself to smile and talk without exposing them. I watched my dad have this flashback, this burst of youth and carelessness and acting like a dumbass, and I realized that he hadn’t always been my dad. And I realized that he would never just be my dad. I’d always looked at him and thought: here is my dad. And that was all he was. But watching him in the car that day I saw years of who he really was, who he had been before I’d been there. I saw another era in his energy, I saw a time when people didn’t sit at home and watch TV and scroll through Facebook. They went out and found each other. They went out and had to actually introduce themselves to new people, just walk up and say hi, whether they had mutual friends or not. My dad had social skills. My dad had charisma.

“Baby Got Back” was on a homemade CD with several other songs just like it - funky relics of the 80s and 90s. My uncle had burned the CD for him (another technology soon to be obsolete), and one very similar for me. As the next song came on, my dad left the volume up and sustained his level of energy. We were driving on the interstate, heading out to Oak Park to visit my grandmother, leaving what had been a long week behind us, and temporarily forgetting that there was another one ahead of us.