These images suggest the preening fashion element of the pimping idea, epitomized by the MTV car-design series Pimp My Ride. The covers tend to feature ornate, eye-grabbing collages of scantily clad women, flashy threads and long guns, familiar to anyone who has picked up a paperback by Donald Goines, Elroy Waters or other black crime novelists. That would be the house illustration style at Holloway House Publishing Co., which published most of Slim's books. “If you have ever seen the original cover of the book, it looks like a Harlequin romance novel.” “I really didn’t know what I was looking at,” Gifford says by phone. Some of the students took him aside, showed him a copy of Pimp and told him: "You need to read this Iceberg Slim guy." As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Gifford spent afternoons in inner-city high schools, where he'd extol the virtues of canonized black writers like Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison. Gifford, an English professor at the University of Nevada at Reno, first encountered Pimp in Slim's old stomping grounds of Chicago. He died in his adopted home city of Los Angeles in 1992, as the city burned through the Rodney King riots. He got married and wrote what would become his first and most acclaimed book, Pimp: The Story of My Life, in 1967. He quit the game after several prison terms. His transfer, as he puts it, was remarkable. That is why I could transfer from pimping." "To be a great pimp, you've really got to hate your mother," he is quoted in the biography. Indeed, Slim explains in Street Poison that he loved his mom too much to ever become a great pimp. Women are to be used and discarded, and feelings are for suckers. These songs tend to be troubling odes to emotional detachment, in which any relationship that doesn't revolve around sexual domination and intimidation is suspect. Jay-Z collaborated with the Port Arthur duo UGK on the obscenely catchy “Big Pimpin’.” Before that, Big Daddy Kane was eager to remind us that “Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy.” More recently, Three 6 Mafia gave us “Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” which merely won an Oscar for best song in 2006 (which prompted one of host Jon Stewart’s best ad-libs of the night: “I think it just got a little easier out here for a pimp.”) You needn’t dig deep into the hip-hop hit list to find celebrations of pimping exploits.
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