Sisqo has spoken to Billboard for seemingly no other reason but to discuss his massive 2000 single ‘Thong Song’.
Among the bombs dropped by the now-38-year-old was that he had never actually seen a thong before writing the legendary chorus.
“I had never seen one before,” he told Billboard. “Apparently none of my friends had actually seen one, before because in 1999, there wasn’t a whole lot of thongs being worn unless it was in some sort of swimsuit ad. I just remembered first seeing one and it was like… you ever seen The Ten Commandments, when Moses went up and his hair was black, and then he came back down and his hair was all silver? That was literally the joke I was making with [my] silver hair. [The thong] was stone tablet-ed into my mind.”
He also hit out at the implication that the woman with “dumps like a truck” was, ahem, going to the bathroom – something that seems to have been weighing heavily on his mind for close to two decades.
“Anybody that was trying to make a joke, the context of the lyric does not say anything to the effect of she took a dump like a truck or nothing like that. She had dumps like a truck, so that joke is old. Nobody can use it no more. You sound stupid. Stop it.”
He also recalled the moment the idea for the chorus came to him, after a friend recounted a story of scoring with a woman the night before, singing the now-famous “thong-th-thong-thong-thong”. (So, he basically nicked it!)
“This is a masterpiece — you can’t just throw something in there,” he says of the song’s potential at the time. “And I was like, wait, let me try and see if it works up in there. [sings] ‘I like it when the beat go/ Baby make your booty go/ Girl I know you want to show/ That what? Sing it with me. That thong-th-thong-thong!’ And everybody said ‘Aw snap!’ and started doing the robot. We were laughing at first like it was a joke, but then later we laughed all the way to the bank.”
He also explained that he chose not to write a second verse, as it would kill the allure of this woman, and referred to the song as “pretty much like my ‘Thriller’ — it’s like a moment in time.”
Check out the entire conversation here.
