Looking back at Sir Mix-a-lot’s heyday around 1990, and comparing his lyrics to those of other rappers of the day, I realize that he used some slang terms that I don’t recall hearing from other rappers.
So I wonder if these particular terms were Seattle-specific slang, or if I just missed hearing them from non-Seattle rappers:
“Swass”, the title of Mix’s debut album. The title track’s chorus featured the line, “Don’t you wish your boyfriend was swass like me?” It seems to be a word meaning “cool, stylish”.
“Clucker”, typically used in Mix’s songs to refer to drug-addicted young women.
I live in Washington, only a couple hundred miles from Seattle, and neither of these slang terms were in use in my town before Mix used them.
My alternative theory is that both words were simply made up by Mix-a-lot. Evidence: In his song, “My Hooptie”, he describes approaching a young woman with, “Rolled up smooth with the homemade slang”.
Hmm. That’s another word I don’t recall ever hearing from a non-Seattle-based rapper: “hooptie”, to describe an old, beat-up, uncool car.
I’m from the Pacific Northwest and I remember hearing the term “hooptie” before Sir Mix-a-lot used it. However, a decrepit old motor vehicle is more often called a klunker, junker, heap, or beater.
SF Bay Area, “hooptie” was certainly in use in the early 1980s. We mostly used it to refer to a clunker bicycle but it was a pretty generic term for a beater vehicle of any kind.
Clucker is used by Eazy-E as well in a song as a junky “he’s addicted, he’s a smoker, but in Compton called a clucker” and “THe the bailif I had was the neighborhood cluck”