Cover of Dr. Dre’s single Fuck Wit Dre Day
3 June 2024
Bootylicious is an adjective meaning sexually attractive. It is formed from booty + -alicious, which is derived from delicious. The word is an Americanism that got its start in Black slang. Use of the combining form -alicious to form new words dates to the late nineteenth century and marks the quality of the first element of the compound as being appetizing or attractive.
The earliest known use of bootylicious is by the Los Angeles rap group W.C. and the Maad Circle on their September 1991 song Back to the Underground. It’s being used in the sense of weak or contemptible lyrics:
I'm bucking up these MCs, Rappers are coming in stacks and packs
But on the real; most of y'all ain't saying jack (YEP!)
But the same old, same old, so what you got a little fame!
(Dig a dam) What's up with this Rap Game?
Seems like you gotta be whack or even super Bootylicious to get paid
I gotta wear Fade
I guess I'll be a broke motherfucker with the dollar to my name
Cause I ain't crossing over the fame (Hell No!)
In April 1992, rapper Dr. Dre recorded the word bootylicous in the lyrics to the song Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’). The song was written by Snoop Doggy Dog, as he then styled himself, who also performed in the recording along with Dre. The song was released that December on Dre’s album The Chronic. The single was released in May 1993.
The song is diss on fellow rapper Easy-E, who had led the rap group N.W.A., to which both Dre and Snoop had belonged. Dre and Snoop accused Easy-E, along with N.W.A.’s manager Jerry Heller, of cheating the other members of the group. Dre and Snoop use bootylicious to refer to Easy-E’s weak or poor lyrics:
Your bark was loud but your bite wasn't vicious
And them rhymes you were kickin' were quite bootylicious
This sense of bootylicious seems to come from a sexist metaphor of women being poor songwriters. Dre and Snoop are accusing Easy-E of writing like a woman. This sense is evidence that bootylicious was already established in oral use in the sexually attractive sense.
They were not the only ones to use bootylicious in this sense. We see this in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a Black newspaper, on 19 May 1994:
The “Bootylicious” Award” goes to Kool-Aid who also gets the “Worse [sic] Use of a Sample Award.” I don’t know if you’ve peeped this one out, but it has some rooty-poot kid sampling Naughty By Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray.” First off [sic] all, ole boy sounds stupid as I don’t know what. Then if you check the audience that he’s supposed to be performing in front of, you’ll see that there’s not a black face in the crowd. You know why, ’cause only white folks would sample Naughty’s top hit for a Kool-Aid commercial.
But this sense of bootylicious referring to bad rap lyrics did not have legs, eventually fading from use.
We see the sexually attractive sense by December 1993, with the release of Domino’s (Shawn Antoine Ivy’s) Do You Qualify? on his eponymous album:
She's only sixteen, but looks twenty-two,
And age isn't a factor cuz she's fine to the dude,
And plus she's built like a truck there must be somethin' in her food,
Or her water,
Because she's somebody's daughter
Who's attractive to a son, as well their father's,
And they know this, that ass sticks with us,
And like my homie told me once she's quite bootylicious,
Watch your mouth drop with them dubs that she threw on,
Dandy like candy, so you can get your chew on,
What'cha wanna do? What'cha gonna do?
When you find out that she's far from twenty-two?
And this sense appears in print two months later in an article about youth slang in Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune on 17 January 1994. Given that it’s Idaho, the article is most likely describing the speech of white youth, which shows how much influence Black rap artists had on teen slang, both white and Black, of the era, and is further evidence that bootylicious was quite active in oral use before seeing print:
Winning the prize for originality: “flippen flappin’,” an expression of anger; “booty-licious,”' as good-looking; “wheaties,” describing any farmers; “womyn,” a slang for a female; and “yum,” an expression for when a girl sees a good-looking guy.
We see a parallel development in white slang at about the same time with the word babelicious. That word is also recorded in 1992, in the film Wayne’s World, starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, in which the following exchange takes place:
WAYNE: But before we go, we’d like to take a moment here for a Wayne's World salute to the Guess jeans girl, Claudia Schiffer. Schwing!
GARTH: Schwing!
WAYNE: Tent pole! She's a babe.
GARTH: She's magically babelicious.
WAYNE: She tested very high on the strokability scale.
(Reader Adam Ford notes, quite correctly, that magically babelicious is a riff on the tagline for Lucky Charms cereal, “They’re magically delicious.”)
The two words showcase how white and Black slang interacted in the era. The two are recorded at about the same time, but there is evidence that bootylicious had earlier currency in oral use, so it seems likely that Myers’s use of babelicious was influenced by bootylicious. But it is possible that babelicious had an earlier currency as well. If so, the two would seem to have developed in parallel. But with rap’s growing popularity among white youth in the mid-1990s, bootylicious crossed over and became far more popular than its white counterpart.
Sources:
Domino (Shawn Antoine Ivy). “Do You Qualify?” Ohhla.com (The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive), n.d.
Dr. Dre (Andre Romell Young) and Snoop Dogg (Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr.). “Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’).”. The Chronic (album), 1992. Azlyrics.com.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. booty, n.2, bootylicious, adj., babe, n.
Mitchell, Marsha. “Peace from the Editor!” Los Angeles Sentinel, 19 May 1994, C-6/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Myers, Mike, Bonnie Turner, and Terry Turner, writers. Wayne’s World (film), Penelope Sheeris, director. Paramount Pictures, 1992. TikTok.com.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. booty, n.3; September 2004, s.v., bootylicious, adj., babelicious, adj.
The Right Rhymes, n.d., s.v. bootylicious, adj. (Shout out to Jesse Sheidlower for pointing this site out to me.)
Vogt, Andrea. “Youth and Language the Dynamics of ‘Dissin’ ‘Wassup? Yo, Homies Are Down with the Code[‘] (Translation: Like Their Predecessors in American Pop Culture, Teen-Agers of the ’90s Have Created Their Own Novel Language.” Lewiston Tribune (Idaho), 17 January 1994. NewsBank: Access World News—Historical and Current.
W.C. and the Maad Circle. “Back to the Underground.” Ohhla.com (The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive), n.d.
Image credit: Death Row Records, 1993. Wikipedia. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of the image to illustrate the topic under discussion.