PIMP: how did a bad word come to be cool ?

[Elano]

PIMP: IT ONCE MEANT SOMEONE WHO WAS A CRIMINAL, BUT NOT ANYMORE. HOW DID A BAD WORD COME TO BE COOL?

Sometimes a huge cultural change is signaled by an earthquake and sometimes by the rustling of pages. A cultural shift can be detected, I believe, in a cartoon that ran in the September 6, 2004, issue of The New Yorker. The scene is a beach party, the crowd looks très Hamptons, and one reveler turns to another and says: “Love the tie, Chad—that is so pimp!”


Over the past few years, the meaning of the word pimp has dramatically changed to the point where today it describes something fashionable. Once, pimps were considered rather bad figures, criminals even. Today they are as prevalent on movie screens as superheroes and approaching the popularity of Spider-Man. In the new comedy Be Cool, Vince Vaughn plays a pimp-suited music biz manager, a white boy harvesting laughs as his efforts to act “black” backfire. Lil’ Pimp, an animated cartoon of a nine-year-old who hangs out with street characters and picks up their style, was recently released. Because what, other than Vince Vaughn rocking Burberry and a gold chain, could be funnier than a nine-year-old learning how to keep a ho in her place? Meanwhile, one of the top award winners at Sundance this year was Hustle & Flow, a drama about a pimp who suffers a midlife crisis and decides to become a rapper. At a festival screening, during a scene when the pimp slaps a woman in a recording studio to make her sing with more passion, the audience went positively giddy.

These days pimping can get you hauled off to jail, but it can also get you your own book deal and cable reality show, which is a lot more than can be said for corporate crime. Rapper Nelly recently started marketing an energy drink called Pimp Juice, targeted at youths. The product has been protested by a number of organizations, including L.A.’s Project Islamic HOPE. This hasn’t fazed Nelly; he simply announced he was funding annual P.I.M.P. college scholarships targeting Positive Intellectual Motivated Persons. What are you, against P.I.M.P.s? A local costume manufacturer is selling “pimp” and “ho” children’s costumes for Halloween. Not to mention, of course, the success of the L.A.-based car-customizing show Pimp My Ride on MTV.

“I think when Bay Area rapper Too Short was talking about pimping back in the day, it was really subversive,” says Jeff Chang, author of the great new Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. “Now, for someone like Snoop Dogg to come out on the stage in pimp gear, it’s the definition of outrageous style. In that way the idea has been defanged.”


The depth of this cultural schism is most visible, however, in a recent case decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The case began when some snarky whippersnapper at an ESPN extreme sports Web site—love the tie, Chad—ran a picture of motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel flanked by two attractive women. The caption read evel knievel proves that you’re never too old to be a pimp. Any teenager would have gotten the drift: He’s a cool dude. He’s one of us.

But the 66-year-old mack daddy wasn’t having it. When Knievel saw the caption, he called his lawyer, perhaps proving you’re never too old to reinflate a flagging career. He sued for libel.


In January the Ninth Circuit dealt him a Snake River kind of defeat, declining to overturn a lower court’s judgment that Knievel’s claim was without merit. He thought the caption had linked him with “immoral and improper behavior” and dragged his name into “public disgrace and scandal.” The ESPN team thought it was celebrating him. And the judges—well, besides shooting down Knievel, they took a stab at defining pimp, and for jollies attempted to explain rollin’ deep, kick it, and hottie. Which, let’s face it, is more than Clarence Thomas could do. Then they collectively threw their hands in the air, concluding that context is everything when it comes to “loose, figurative” language—like calling somebody a pimp in the public square. “Pimping ain’t easy,” goes an old hip-hop lyric, an opinion with which the Ninth Circuit lustily agreed. Rather, pimpin’ is complicated. Through his lawyer, Knievel says he plans to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.


Forty-six years ago, three young women from Hutchinson, Kansas, wrote a letter to a group of beatniks in Venice, California. They were bored stiff in their small town and wanted “to be cooled” by the harbingers of the new craze. The women invited the West Coasters to visit their town and remake it.


That was the idea, anyway. But as Life magazine reported, when the elders of Hutchin­son heard that dangerous folks—they smoked pot! they listened to jazz!—were heading their way, they put the kibosh on the invitation. Beatniks might have their place, but do you really want your daughter to drink espresso with one? The women said they’d only heard secondhand about the Venice contingent, and didn’t know it was dangerous.

The story got big play as a tale of cultures clashing. Today, though, you have to wonder if Hutchinson understood bohemianism better than Venice. The town’s women tossed away the candy and saved the wrapper—saw beat culture as a style that could spice up their lives as much as it was about lasting art. Forty-six years later, isn’t that what has happened? We’ve reached a point where a style—whether it’s pimp or beatnik—belongs to everybody and therefore belongs to nobody, not even the folks who came up with it in the first place.
In the years during and after World War II, the modern image of the pimp was being assembled in places like L.A.’s Little Tokyo. After the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans, African Americans squeezed by restrictive covenants flowed into one of the few areas avail­able to them in the city. Renamed Bronze­ville for a few years, the neighborhood was going ghetto fabulous decades before Snoop Dogg first put a pimp cup to his lips.

In a letter to the black newspaper the Los Angeles Tribune, a reader in the mid-1940s lamented the prominence pimps were starting to enjoy, writing that “the high esteem in which the pimp is held on E. 5th street must be destroyed.” Another letter writer ventured a statistical assessment, positing, “At least 90% of all the women on E. 5th St. are prostitutes. About 50% are bold ones.”


Pimps were powerful figures along the street, symbolizing prowess and mastery of the system—make that “the system,” almost a mystical combine that organized the daily lives of the average laborer. They had mastered “the game,” and the world they inhabited was known as “the life.” Pimps created a reality of their own, were able to ascribe quotation marks to existence itself. Pimps were regarded by some with a slightly cosmic affection. They knew how things worked. And they worked not. Here is journalist J.T. Gipson quoting Artie Graves, a pimp on Central Avenue, in a California Eagle column from 1945: “Overwork killed my father, and I promised it would never kill me…and it never has!”


Songs and columns about pimps weren’t glorifying a criminal type nearly so much as they were celebrating an old folk hero. His lavish lifestyle resonated among getting-by blacks. Work clothes were the uniform of the masses, but dressed in the fancy cut and wild colors of the trade, the pimp declared himself a truly free man. His world was forbidden, and he kept it that way, but what he didn’t broadcast was that he practiced brutal exploitation of women. There are uncomfortable echoes of slavery in the celebration of the pimp—here was somebody not just in control of his own destiny but that of others, too.

It wasn’t until a Chicago pimp named Iceberg Slim moved to L.A. in the 1960s and traded the sportin’ life for the writin’ life that pimps found their literary voice. In 1969, he published his autobiography, Pimp: The Story of My Life, and later a series of novels and memoirs that featured over-the-top boasting and updated notions of the pimp for the era of black power.

All of which shows how the pimp became an underground superstar but doesn’t explain how he made the leap to ESPN, to movies, and to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. How did a person who oppressed women for financial gain become a role model for suburban white kids?

One answer is found in the success of L.A. rapper Snoop Dogg. Snoop’s had his run-ins with the law (and is being sued for rape), but still he is loved by Hollywood and in suburban malls. Dressed in furs and floppy hats, Snoop revels in the preposterousness of pimping. Snoop’s character is a ghetto Donald Trump, a mountebank with money, a goof who knows how to enjoy life. For America’s suburbs, the legend is the fact: Snoop plays the legend.

He’s managed not just to hold on to his celebrity for more than a decade but to deepen it. Only a few years ago Snoop was representing himself as a gangbanger. Now he plays the lovable hustler Huggy Bear in the remake of Starsky & Hutch, and on his latest hit album, R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece, he continues this directional shift, presenting himself as a pimp’s pimp. He’s less the street-level thug and more the string-puller floating above the streets.

In a recent cover story in Blender magazine (“America’s Favorite Pimp!”), Snoop is seen coaching his son’s Rowland Heights Pop Warner football team to victory. After the game he leads the boys in a rollicking cheer of “pimp, pimp, hooray!” Meanwhile, a Fox-produced documentary depicting Snoop as caring coach and dad is in progress. Fox would never have celebrated the rapper when he was a Crip soldier, but today dad and pimp are complementary, and Snoop is an amiable, sozzled cartoon character—Dean Martin with bigger rings.

In shutting down evel knievel’s lawsuit, the hipsters on the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that ESPN’s use of pimp was a form of “youthful, non-literal language” that was “lighthearted, jocular, and intended for a youthful audience.” That leaves open the question of whether we want our judges to be arbiters of our language. Most of us would probably prefer society itself to monitor its usage, except that lately society seems to have dropped the ball.


Words are malleable, and the only time they are truly fixed in meaning is when a language, if not a society, is dead. In the case of pimp, it’s certainly possible that it could shift once more, as a word and as a symbol.

“That was one of the things that made ‘pimp’ so exploitable,” says Jeff Chang, “because in the end you could portray the pimp as some kind of grand American entrepreneur, pushing bodies instead of widgets. It was the Horatio Alger dream taken to an objectionable extreme. But there’s always the possibility that the word can be turned around to demonstrate the opposite of what it seems to mean.”


Chang sees a chance for the metaphor of pimping to be used to explore topics of gender, violence, and joblessness. “But it’s not there yet. Now it’s just a slang word that is so overused: ‘I got over on you, I pimped you.’ But those words can be flipped in a heartbeat.”

Until the next flip, spare some sympathy for Evel Knievel. He’s an old-school guy from Montana, a craggy-faced westerner who hews to an old-school belief: that words have meaning, and that once they lose their meaning society runs off the rails. He knows what he knows, and what he knows is that a pimp is someone he doesn’t want to be. Any more than he wants the women on his arm—one of whom was his wife—to be called “ho’s.”

[JAZ]

im not reading that.

[K.Dub]

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch/v/5vEc-9IUzWs" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://youtube.com/watch/v/5vEc-9IUzWs</a>
<a href="http://youtube.com/watch/v/1_tShaLOgaE" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://youtube.com/watch/v/1_tShaLOgaE</a>

[Elevz]

Well, how about gangsta? How about every thuggish word that's now glorified as a virtue?

[Javier]

Well, how about gangsta? How about every thuggish word that's now glorified as a virtue?

Pimp is new (in terms of losing its original meaning) and has more mainstream appeal than any other "thuggish" word. 

[Elevz]

Well, how about gangsta? How about every thuggish word that's now glorified as a virtue?

Pimp is new (in terms of losing its original meaning) and has more mainstream appeal than any other "thuggish" word. 

Not more than bling. It's really odd to see foreign news hosts talk about bling. Then again, bling isn't too thugged out, is it?

[Tommy Illnigga]

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch/v/5vEc-9IUzWs" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://youtube.com/watch/v/5vEc-9IUzWs</a>
<a href="http://youtube.com/watch/v/1_tShaLOgaE" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://youtube.com/watch/v/1_tShaLOgaE</a>

LMAO, Mike Epps was too funny in How High