the pseudo-pimp game

Here's a site that pimpafies your name for you.

I tell you, I'm sick of all this pimp shit.

Why? Because I started it, that's why.

Allow me to clarify: I didn't start the profession of pimping a.k.a. "easy riding" a.k.a. "pandering". No, that dubious distinction belongs elsewhere.

What I mean is: I was the first person in the world to use the word 'pimp' outside of its original context.

For a brief time in the '70's, pimp chic was in. The movies Shaft and Superfly were in vogue. Disco was big. Fashion was outrageous, the result of too many Quaaludes and not enough sober reflection.

But it never transcended beyond a cultish following, and once punk rock started to usurp the Establishment values from the bottom up, it soon became unfashionable to wear floppy pimp hats and goldfish-bowl platform heels.

Or at least that's what The Fashion Police wanted you to believe at the time.


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I was born in 1974. I grew up in the '70's and came of age in the '80's. I remember what it was like in my neighborhood: the pimp chic never died. We still wore butterfly collars on our shirts, sported corderuoy jeans, and our hair covered our ears.

We thought it was genuinely cool to dress this way. I remember getting bagged on for wearing the shit I wore. When the '80's descended upon me, I changed my style to fit in, but I knew in my heart that pimp shit was cool.

Mind you, I didn't know what a pimp was or what they did for a living. I just knew that Huggy Bear on Starsky & Hutch was a pimp. I knew that Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver was a pimp.

I also knew that, subconsciously, the move away from pimp chic had a lot to do with the rise of racial intolerance in the early Reagan years. The slogan "Disco sucks" was seen, in my community, as a nice way of saying "Fuck black and brown culture". Why? Because the majority of people saying "Disco sucks" were white.

That's why it took me a long time to embrace punk culture-- until I heard of bands like Fishbone, Suicidal Tendencies and Bad Brains, I was convinced that punk rock was "white-boy music", as I heard it described in 1983.

Anyway, rap and hip-hop descended from disco, and so that's how I got into that scene. And one of my favorite early rappers was a man named Tracey Morrow. His stage name was Ice T.

Ice T started off as a disco MC, a freestyler, and a fixture on the burgeoning L.A. rap scene, what is now known collectively as "The West Coast". Back in 1983, L.A. was trying to get recognized by NYC, the birthplace of hip-hop. We had a radio station (KDAY, recently resurrected here in Los Angeles) and we had a few underground hits and artists, but nothing out here could compete with RUN-DMC or Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The East Coast was controlling the game up until this point.

Ice T is known nowadays as the architect of "gangsta rap" but he started off doing party jams like everyone else. Check out the MC in the cult movie classic Breakin'-- it's none other than Ice motherfuckin' T, y'all! In an Adidas running suit, no less!

Ice T was the first rapper I heard who referred to pimping, in the immortal song "Pimpin' Ain't Easy (But Somebody Got To Do It)" off his Rhyme Pays album. On the cover, Ice is wearing a fat diamond ring, with a gold pistol swinging from his dookie rope chain, as a big booty bitch sits next to him, helping him count his cash.

As much as I loved RUN-DMC, they didn't have big booty bitches in their videos or on their album covers. They didn't have songs about sex or pimping. RUN-DMC were pretty wholesome, when you think about it.

After a while, I used the word "pimp" to describe anything that had a '70's vibe to it, or anything that involved making money or "jocking chicks".

It was a joke. Before I started using the word, pimping wasn't something kids aspired to. I recall a rumor that started among my friends, that the word "dude" meant "a wart on an elephant's ass"; someone also chimed in that it meant "a pimp", but we still kept on using the word "dude" despite all of that.

So, using the word "pimp" was social suicide, in a way. I didn't care.

And, just like my imitation of Al Pacino in Scarface, it took off. Soon, everywhere I looked, people were claiming "pimp" as their own. I thought nothing of it.

It died out after a while, but I kept using the word. And I would get clowned by my '80's-immersed friends for calling this "pimp" or calling that "pimp". And until I was 16, I still didn't know what pimps did for a living.

Finally, after being clued in by the black kids in my neighborhood, I found out what a pimp really was. And I still kept using the word. Now, it was even funnier to use the word... especially as an adjective.

"Hey, man, that's a real pimp jacket you got on!"

"Man, fuck you, James. Why you gotta dis?"

"I ain't dissin' you-- that's my way of saying your jacket is fresh!"

"Well, then, say it's fresh-- what's this 'pimp' shit? That 'pimp' shit is wick-wick-wack!"

"Yeah, you might get beat up callin' somebody a pimp."

"Whatever, guys. You can keep saying 'fresh' and 'nasty' and all that. I'll stick with 'pimp', all right?"

And I did. I pioneered the use of the word 'pimp' as an adjective. The rest is slang history.


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The Neo-Mack Renaissance started at the end of the '80's, when The Beastie Boys released Paul's Boutique, their second album. The album flopped, due to the inevitable white-rapper backlash, but the first single was a ditty called "Hey Ladies". The video for this song was absolutely hysterical: the Boys were all dressed like extras from Saturday Night Fever, wearing gaudy clothes they had discovered in an abandoned home in Los Angeles. The music sampled West Coast artists like Zapp and the L.A. Dream Team. The video had them cavorting around a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and also frequenting a disco.

Like I said, people slept on that album when it first came out. And if they slept on the album, they most definitely didn't get the "concept" of the video. It was generally believed that The Beastie Boys' career was over.

But game recognizes game, and I knew what was stirring in the air.

By the time I'm Gonna GIt You Sucka came out in theaters, I was telling my guidance counselors at school that I wanted to be a pimp when I grew up. They knew me well enough to know I was joking, but my irreverence still bothered them.

I was still listening to Ice T. Before N.W.A. came out and made everyone want to be a gangster, Ice T was the hardest MC on the mic. Power, his second album, featured Ice on the cover, with the same big booty bitch from the first album (later on I discovered this was his first wife) and an Uzi in his hand. One song was titled "Soul On Ice" and was a direct tribute to an album by an artist named Lightnin' Rod, entitled Hustler's Convention.

Lightnin' Rod is the alter ego of Jalal Nuriddin, one of the Last Poets, a group of pro-black spoken word performers who released albums in the mid-'70's. I'd heard Hustler's Convention via my Japanese grandmother(!) who owned the album on vinyl. The cover was a close-up of the upper torso of a "hustler"-- another term for a pimp. He had a wad of cash in his ring-encrusted fingers.

This is how I became pimpified.


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I never pimped women out, but many times in my life I've felt like I could have done so easily. That's because pimps are not made-- they're born. Ask any pimp how he got into the game, and he'll tell you that when he was a kid, girls used to give him their money to hold onto. This progresses into more, obviously, as time goes on, but a true pimp never initiates it. In fact, a true mack will resist it at first, because he will not understand the motivation of a woman who gives of herself with no strings attached.

There are many myths about pimping: first and foremost, there is a myth that pimps always beat their hoes. While it does happen, I'm sure of it, the main reason a hoe gets a pimp in the first place is because they need protection from the johns, who don't give a two-bit shit about a hooker.

Unfortunately, the myth of the hoe-beating pimp stems from reality-- many of these street walkers don't know how to respond to anything other than cruelty. The pimp ends up beating them because there is no other way to get through to a woman who was raised in a home where beatings came regularly.

This leads to Myth #2: Pimps sleep with their hoes. No, the dumb pimps sleep with their hoes. The smart ones keep a stable, and maybe they might even break a hoe in before turning her out; but the smart pimp knows that he should keep his pen out of the company ink. Just like the crack dealer who doesn't get high off of his own supply, the smart pimp must take on a fatherly interest in his charges. He must view them not as girlfriends or wives, but as misguided nieces, orphaned cousins, illegitimate daughters...

I stated earlier that I could've been a pimp. That's because girls came up to me and gave me things: money, candy, toys, their own jewelry. I inspire trust in a certain type of woman, or maybe their maternal sides come out more in my prescence. Over the years, many women have given of themselves to me, and I always appreciate their generosity. They've given me food, temporary shelter, rides, money, gifts, clothes and what have you. They gave me love and affection and sometimes a shoulder to cry on.

But I chose to be an artist, which is just a pimp who doesn't put his hoes on the street, when you think about it. Instead, the artist refers to his hoes as "muses", and uses them as inspiration instead of financial reliance.

That's not to say that every girl I've ever called my "muse" is a hoe. Rather, they function as a muse to me in almost the same way that a hoe functions to a pimp.

The pimp needs the hoe just as much as the hoe needs the pimp.


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I bring all of this up because I'm sick of the pimpery. Everywhere you look now, it's "pimp" here and "pimp" there. The sad part is, I can tell who the real pimps are and who are the fakers. And let me just say: right now there's more fakers than true pimps out there.

It used to be funny when I was in the rap band, talking about "pimp" this and "pimp" that, because no one else was doing it. I got funny looks from people. After a while, they caught on and followed suit. Soon, I was getting people to laugh at it with me.

Now, it's just not funny. Everyone wants to be a pimp but most of these self-proclaimed players haven't got one single pimp bone in their body. It makes me sick.

So I retired from the pseudo-pimp trade, after I reached my peak. The crowning achievement was in 1996 or 1997, when I won a Halloween costume contest sponsored by my old radio network. The first prize was a three-day cruise to Baja California.

I spent $160 on a costume. I'd never spent that much on a costume, but I was determined to win that cruise.

I dressed up as-- you guessed it --a pimp.

I had an afro wig, one-inch high platform shoes, (which were a size too small, but it enabled me to walk with a pimp limp) a blue velvet jacket and a ruffled baby-blue Mexican tux dress shirt. I even had a Walkman with speakers hooked up inside my jacket, playing my "theme music".

I won the first prize, and what did I turn around and do? I ended up selling the cruise ticket to a co-worker for $600!

I pimped out the First Prize-- now THAT's pimp!

Fuck all this "Pimp My Ride" shit, fuck all these wannabe ballers and players, fuck all the Snoop Dogg imitators and Johnny-Come-Latelies... They're all bandwagon riders, and they wouldn't know anything unless it was dictated to them by mass media.

Shortly after I retired from the pseudo-pimp game, people would ask me to borrow the pimp costume for some 'pimp and ho' ball thrown by some buster lookin' to make a quick buck. They started quoting from movies like American Pimp, or that HBO Undercover special, "Pimps Up Hoes Down".

But me? I'm over it. I'll be over it for some time. But I also know the truth: that at any given moment, I can be right back in that frame of mind again. In fact, I would argue that it never goes away-- I haven't really changed in the sense that, to this day, women still come up to me and give me their time, their attention, their opinions. They want to know if I'm doing okay. And I want to know how they are doing also.

Most of my muses-- my "hoes", if you will --are settled down, married perhaps, or maybe they found another pimp. They have moved on, and have kids and jobs and they are real happy. And I am happy for them, because they knew me at a time when I needed them just as much as they relied on me for whatever it was they saw in me.

If I had ever become a real pimp, earning a living off of prostitutes, I think I would've been the Thomas Jefferson of pimps. I'd be like Doctor Detroit. Anyone remember Doctor Detroit?

No? That's okay. Only the real hustlers know...