Pimp: The Story of My Life

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Dave Chappelle famously turned down 50 million dollars for a project because he had a crisis of consciousness regarding his personal integrity. In his show "The Bird Revelation", he explained his reasons by drawing parallels to Iceberg's book about the inner workings of the male-dominated sex trade and its messages about capitalism in general. Here's the bit in question. After learning the subtle nuances of the pimping game from Sweet and his pal “Glass Top”, Slim experiences the ups and downs of the lifestyle he sought; his bitches rat him out to the feds, he almost screws a tranny in a ridiculously hilarious scene, he gets swindled and conned, he swindles and cons, he batters his trollops, goes to prison several times, pulls a jailbreak, and discovers it’s feast or famine in this cop & blow game. Slim soon finds his mentor in the city’s top pimp, Sweet Jones. Sweet, who is close to fifty when they meet, had come to Chicago from Georgia as a teen and made a fortune. He had a stable of ten whores, and was universally feared and respected. In his special The Bird Revelation, comedian Dave Chappelle used the life of Iceberg Slim and the world of his book Pimp as a parable for his experience in show business. [18] [19] Both Sweet and Iceberg learned hardness and hatred from the traumas of their youth. As Bessel Van Der Kolk said in his book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, “Hurt people hurt other people.”

Sweet, whose parents had likely been slaves, tells Iceberg that the best pimps, the ones who wrote the book, were freed slaves who had come to Chicago from the South. They saw a world composed of masters and slaves, and they knew which side of that relationship they wanted to be on. Maybe we need to make prostitution legal, and just like the current battle for women’s reproductive rights, boot the men out of the equation...well, except for when they want to exchange their cabbage for getting their pipes clean. Men should be customers only. Their opinions about women's bodies they can keep to themselves. This book is a thoughtful and brutal examination of the choices one is forced to make in a world turned against the individual. In prose reminiscent of a street-wise Dostoyevsky, the author recounts the story of his life through various moralistic phases. These tend to impress upon the reader a recurring theme, not of the universe's intense silence to human cries, but of openly ambivalent laughter and playfulness that voices itself most loudly in universally relevant cosmic irony. Sweet teaches Slim to maintain absolute physical and psychological control over his women through physical brutality and psychological manipulation. The treatment he prescribes is essentially the same playbook that plantation owners practiced on slaves: beat them, gaslight them, remind them at every turn that they are worthless and powerless, wring all you can out of them until they’re physically and psychologically ruined. Then go find new ones to recruit. If you want to be a master, you have to find someone beneath you to enslave, someone even more down and out than yourself. Sweet says, “‘Berg, ain’t but one real Heaven for a pimp. He’s in it when there’s a big pool of raggedy, hungry young bitches.” By that measure, the ghetto in Chicago during the depression, full of desperate souls with no escape, was a pimp’s Heaven. (Though Slim always describes the ghetto as Hell with a capital H.)In 1961, after serving 10 months of solitary confinement in a Cook County jail, Maupin decided he was too old for a life of pimping (he was 42) and was unable to compete with younger, more ruthless pimps. Spiceberg Slim is a moniker and the eighth studio album (released in 2002) by American rapper Spice 1. [26]

This is part of Slim’s initiation into the cutthroat underworld of a notoriously corrupt city. He calls his neighborhood Hell, and describes a nighttime walk after shooting cocaine: For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Scottish author Irvine Welsh offered that ‘Iceberg Slim did for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the homosexual and thief and William Burroughs did for the junkie: he articulated the thoughts and feelings of someone who had been there. The big difference is that they were white.’" Donnelly, Matt (February 26, 2010). "Art imitating Rob Weiss: 'Entourage' archetype knows 'How to Make It in America' ". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved February 25, 2015. Irvine Welsh has stated that Iceberg did for the pimp what William S. Burroughs did for the junky and Jean Genet for the thief, and it's probably true. His influence on rap culture can hardly be overestimated - or why do you think Ice-T and Ice Cube have these names? There also is a documentary about his influence that seems to be pretty good. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

What kind of person could possibly be so loathsome as to become a pimp? How could a person's humanity be warped to the point of victimizing women under the pretense of love and protection? How could anyone have any sympathy for someone who engages in the most despicable crimes? The whole book is a stream of consciousness type of story re-arranged to make sense. As it was being re-arranged, someone broke out the thesaurus and added footnotes (I had theory classes in college with less footnotes) to add a bit of legitimacy to the work. There is a lot of repetition as well. The author loves to say the exact same thing over and over just dressed a little differently. It wasn’t unlike reading an Ayn Rand novel. It was akin to playing a video game from the 80s where you keep dying on a level and have to start said level over again. You get a little further each time, but you go over the same stuff a lot. See what I just did there?

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I would have more sympathy for Iceberg Slim, trying to find the best way to hustle, if he hadn’t been such a brutal asshole. The world has never been a fair place, and the rules are never applied evenly. A banker can write a loan and front load all the interest, but a loan shark who does the same thing is breaking the law. The pharmaceutical companies can make trillions pumping out drugs to a population who doesn’t need them, but if a drug dealer does the same thing, he goes to jail. At 18 years old, Iceberg Slim, then known as Young Blood, decides to become a pimp. I passed beneath an El-train bridge. A terrified, glowing face loomed toward me in the tunnel’s gloom. It was an elderly white man trapped behind enemy lines. A train furled by overhead. It bombed and strafed the street. The shrapnel fell in gritty clouds. This is one brutal book, and a damn good one. Slim writes with a fire that you rarely see even from great authors at their best. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, nor does he lace his narrative with apologies to reassure delicate readers. He simply gives a straightforward account of a cruel world in which the cruelest rise to the top… at least for a while. Eddie Murphy's character Velvet Jones, from Saturday Night Live, has been described as a spoof of Iceberg Slim. [20] A pimp is the loneliest bastard on Earth. He’s gotta know his whores. He can’t let them know him. He’s gotta be God all the way.”

Scottish author Irvine Welsh said: "Iceberg Slim did for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the homosexual and thief and William Burroughs did for the junkie: he articulated the thoughts and feelings of someone who had been there." [3] Academia [ edit ] Whether Slim is good, bad, or both, doesn't much matter to me. This book is uncompromising, pulls no punches, and makes no concessions to your PC sensibilities. It's misogynistic, racist, lewd and discomfiting. It's a report from a part of the world I'm happy to not be a part of.

The general facts presented by Slim are likely true. That is, where he says he was imprisoned and when we can probably believe. However, it is the nature of that profession (and the nature of a writer, as well as the nature of an autobiography) to glorify the self in a way that is certainly deceptive. Was Iceberg Slim molested by a religious nut babysitter when he was just little Bobby Maupin? That's hard to say. Even if one wants to believe the testimony of children in such a situation, one must temper that desire with the recognition that as Iceberg Slim he made his living as a depraved and drug-addled liar whose every word was a rationalization of his own behavior. That means that as a book it's a decent piece of work. As a confession it is almost certainly not decent (in any sense of that word.) Slim had been connected with several other well-known pimps, one of them Albert "Baby" Bell, [5] a man born in 1899 who had been pimping for decades and had a Duesenberg and a bejeweled pet ocelot. [5] Another pimp, who had gotten Slim hooked on cocaine, went by the name of "Satin" [5] and was a major drug figure in the eastern part of the country. [4] He grew up believing that compassion and generosity were signs of weakness, that people would walk all over you if you let them. Respect was earned through fear and intimidation. It was a hard way to live.