Pimping ain't easy

THESIS:

The Academy Award winner for best original song for 2005 is called “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp.”

In it, the rappers of Three 6 Mafia show the softer, vulnerable side of pimps, exploring the hardships endured by the perhaps the second oldest profession. A profession that, in terms of what Buddha said about “Right Livelihood,” ranks a notch above slave trader.

This has been explained in newspaper, media accounts and the mouths of some liberals as a nod to “urban culture,” which is a roundabout way of saying African-American culture for people who have grown tired of talking about race in terms of, well, race.

In other words, the whites that make up the majority of the academy and the white suburban males who buy most of rap music (or illegally download it) have given this nod to the objectification of another’s sexual function for profit, because it’s black culture?

The song is perhaps receiving its awards at an appropriate time, just as South Dakota outlawed abortion in an attempt to challenge the 1973 Supreme court decision in Roe v. Wade. But not only is it overtly sexist, in that it glorifies the subjugation of women for profit (I feel like I need to keep saying that, the whole profit thing), it is also racist, in that it glorifies the subjugation of black women for profit (In the words of Will Ferrell, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills).

Not to mention that people out there are reaping windfalls from the sale of a song (it should be mentioned that the black men and women who wrote and performed the song also get a cut) that smacks of the lamest kind of minstrel act while black women are being infected with a deadly disease at a higher rate than any other demographic. What about for next year’s awards they nominate, “It’s Hard Out Here For A Drug Addict Who Gets Beaten And Raped And Ends Up With AIDS So Some Asshole Can Buy Expensive Shoes?”

What about “It’s Hard Out Here For A Skinhead,” or, “It’s Hard Out Here For A Serial Killer,” two groups of people in the moral company of pimps? When are they going to get their day? God, seeing that song get an award, I felt like I was in 1930s Germany, where good and evil had been inverted and nobody that wasn’t killed or tortured cared too much.

And the liberals that defended it, it’s beyond relativism. It’s beyond the knee-jerk, nihilistic “anybody that opposes the Government/Society/Whitey must be sympathized with.” At worst it’s racism, the uncritical acceptance that black culture is synonymous with criminal culture. At best, it’s the reluctance of liberal whites to object to oppression as long as black people are apparently doing the oppressing. What ever happened to the liberalism that cared about human dignity?

“It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” is not the first song dedicated to the degradation of black women, nor will it be the last. It's totally a rip-off of Too $Short's "Pimping Ain't Easy."

DEFENSE

DO YOU HATE HIP-HOP?

This is not an attack on hip-hop. It is a counterattack in defense of black women (mostly) perpetrated by the song and its celebration by white mainstream society. We’ve made great strides, in that not all the black people seen in mainstream culture are criminals (there is still a lot of tokenism, however Denzel Washington and Halle Berry and others are respected across the board and make challenging films), and still, we are told that awarding an ode to pimping is somehow recognizing the contribution of blacks in our society.

I love hip hop. I love Eric B and Rakim all the way up to Ghostface Killer and MF Doom. This isn’t about hip hop.

ARE YOU PICKING ON ‘HUSTLE and FLOW?’

It should also be noted that glorification of pimping didn’t start with the “Hustle and Flow” soundtrack. The first widely recognized member of the pimp rap club is Too $hort, a rapper originally from Oakland, who has released 16 albums since 1989.* Many other rappers have taken a nod to “pimping,” like Ice-T and Slick Rick, but usually as part of a glorification of criminal culture in general.

IS ‘PIMP’ ALWAYS A BAD THING?

Pimp has also entered the lexicon of young people to mean, instead of a “night daddy,” to either be synonymous with cool, or a suave person, or to dominate or master something. I had a girlfriend who prided herself on her parallel parking abilities. After a success, she would say, “I pimped that parking spot.”

“It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” has been a long time coming. People have disassociated the word from its meaning. In the mouths of kids today, pimp is a good thing.

DO YOU HAVE SOME SORT OF PERSONAL VENDETTA AGAINST PIMPS

No, but I had a friend in high school who ran away from a youth home and met a man who didn’t have a peacock feather in his hat, who kidnapped her, drugged her, and let any number of men rape her for cash. She was given a sexually transmitted disease, and told if she ever tried to leave he would find her and her family and kill them all. I wonder when the word “slave” might become popular. “I enslaved that parking space.”

OK, YOU DIRTY HYPOCRITE, ANY OTHER THINGS PIMP THAT YOU LIKE?

Although rap is the harem of all things pimp these days, the first to coin the term, “pimpology,” was Iceberg Slim, the pen name of the late former pimp Robert Beck, who has sold six million books as of 1998. The books, autobiographies as well as novels, focus mainly on his days in the sex trade. Beck wrote much about the process of “turning out” a woman, which means that by either force of persuasion, a man puts a woman’s sexual functions on the market.

SO, GO AHEAD AND TIE IT ALL TOGETHER WITH SOMETHING FRUITY AND LIBERAL-SOUNDING

It goes without saying that Beck had a complex relationship with women. It was his mother, on her death bed, who convinced Beck that he had to get out of the sex trade. He turned to writing, and authored some of the best accounts of American criminal culture, books that become more and more relevant as time goes on, apparently.

In what might be his most heart-breaking and chilling work, the novel “Mama Black Widow,” Beck tells the tale of a black family from the south that is destroyed by life in the big city and a castrating mother. The protagonist, a grown man who lives with his mother who is sometimes impelled to don women’s clothing and allow himself to be raped by strangers, is another interesting perspective on women.


GRADE: C-

*Interestingly enough, Too $hort’s 1989 “Don’t Fight the Feeling,” the longest track on his break-out album “Life is ... Too Short,” was a hit among males and females, probably because it gave equal time to two female rappers who responded to Too $hort’s overtures by insulting his hygiene and the size of his member, i.e.:
-“Do they call you short because of your height or your width? Diss me, boy, I’ll hang your balls from a clip.”
-“They call you ‘yuck mouth,’ you refuse to brush. No, sweetheart, you can keep that kiss.”