African American Culture and Society After Rodney King

Provocations and Protests, Progression and 'Post-Racialism'

Josephine Metcalf, Carina Spaulding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317184386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

1992 was a pivotal moment in African American history, with the Rodney King riots providing palpable evidence of racialized police brutality, media stereotyping of African Americans, and institutional discrimination. Following the twentieth anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising, this time period allows reflection on the shifting state of race in America, considering these stark realities as well as the election of the country's first black president, a growing African American middle class, and the black authors and artists significantly contributing to America's cultural output. Divided into six sections, (The African American Criminal in Culture and Media; Slave Voices and Bodies in Poetry and Plays; Representing African American Gender and Sexuality in Pop-Culture and Society; Black Cultural Production in Music and Dance; Obama and the Politics of Race; and Ongoing Realities and the Meaning of 'Blackness') this book is an engaging collection of chapters, varied in critical content and theoretical standpoints, linked by their intellectual stimulation and fascination with African American life, and questioning how and to what extent American culture and society is 'past' race. The chapters are united by an intertwined sense of progression and regression which addresses the diverse dynamics of continuity and change that have defined shifts in the African American experience over the past twenty years.

PART I
The African American Criminal in Culture and Media

Chapter 1
“Ill Parallels”: Ice-T, Iceberg Slim, and Portrait of a Pimp

Will Turner

The rapper Ice-T (née Tracy Marrow) has regularly cited the pimp and author Iceberg Slim (née Robert Maupin, later Robert Beck) as his primary influence. This is most clearly evidenced by Ice-T’s choice of moniker, which directly cites the “icy” disposition that made Iceberg Slim a successful Chicagoan pimp in the 1930s and ’40s.¹ While Ice-T has never actually been a pimp himself, his image is predicated on a pimping or macking pose, which he defines as the projection of “a fly, cool lifestyle.”² Ice-T has projected this lifestyle in songs such as “Somebody’s Gotta Do It! (Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy!!!),” and via a public image that emphasizes conspicuous consumption and heterosexual conquest.³ The pimp pose is a key component of the gangsta rap genre more generally, and Slim has been acknowledged by a range of rappers such as Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and Jay-Z (whose myriad nicknames include “Iceberg Slim”). In particular, Slim’s gritty writing style has been recognized as a major influence on the first-person criminal narratives typical of gangsta rap lyrics.⁴ Ice-T credits Slim’s 1967 memoir Pimp: The Story of My Life as inspiring the “same skills in my rhymes, painting these dark portraits of the world of pimps, hustlers, and gangbangers.”⁵ Slim’s uncompromising depiction of the mid-century African American ghetto provided a blueprint by which gangsta rappers could authentically document their postindustrial milieu.

Iceberg Slim’s valorization by Ice-T and others can also be ascribed to the impact he made on the cultural mainstream. Slim was touted by his publishers Holloway House as “America’s #1 best read black author,” and by the time of his death in 1992 had sold a total of six million books which had been translated into 12 languages.⁶ Slim therefore provided another blueprint that would prove valuable to the hip hop generation: how to package black urban crime narratives for a mass-market audience. Mark Anthony Neal writes that by the mid-1990s, “hip-hop culture had transformed from a subculture primarily influenced by the responses of black urban youth to postindustrialization into a billion-dollar industry in which such responses were exploited by corporate capitalists.”⁷ Ice-T is an exemplar of this shift, having managed his pimp pose across diverse genres and within major record companies, Hollywood film studios, and mainstream publishing houses. As of summer 2014, he can be found portraying a police detective on NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (which he has starred in since 2000) while promoting the latest album by his heavy metal band Body Count. In recent interviews, Ice-T has commented on the “ill parallels” between his and Slim’s trajectory from ghetto hustler to pop-cultural player.⁸

The 2012 documentary film Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp is another recent Ice-T venture that reflects back upon this connection. Ice-T not only features in Portrait of a Pimp as an onscreen contributor, but is the film’s executive producer. The film is the first to be directed by Ice-T’s long-term manager Jorge Hinojosa, and the first to be produced by Ice-T and Hinojosa’s production company, Final Level Entertainment, which has infrequently released music since 2003. Portrait premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2012, before a limited release in selected US cities in July 2013. The film was generally praised by reviewers for the affection and candor with which it told Iceberg Slim’s story. The Los Angeles Times called it “a rough but fascinating warts-and-all bio of a former pimp,” while Variety praised it as a “labor-of-love biodoc that nonetheless offers a warts-and-all evaluation of its subject.”⁹ Portrait of a Pimp succeeds notable film and television documentaries about pimps such as Beeban Kidron’s Hookers, Hustlers, Pimps and Their Johns (1993), Brent Owens’s Pimps Up, Hos Down (1999), and Albert and Allen Hughes’s American Pimp (1999). While the majority of these films privilege the first-hand testimony of current-day pimps, Portrait of a Pimp reconstructs Slim’s biography through interviews with celebrity admirers, academics, family members, and former colleagues (the vast majority of whom are male). In addition, the film brings its subject to life through footage of TV interviews with Slim, animated excerpts from his autobiography, and a wealth of photographs and stock footage.¹⁰

In this chapter, I analyze Portrait of a Pimp as a text that opens up a number of crosscurrents—or “ill parallels”—between Iceberg Slim, Ice-T, and other black cultural producers belonging to the post-soul generation. Neal defines the term “post-soul” as an “aesthetic center within contemporary black popular culture that at various moments considers issues like deindustrialization, desegregation, the general commodification of black life and culture, and the proliferation of black ‘meta-identities.’”¹¹ Despite Iceberg Slim coming of age in the mid-twentieth century, he stands as a foundational symbol for this aesthetic. As both a pimp and a writer of pulp fiction, Slim’s career was marked by currents of resistance, containment, and commodification that speak in important ways to contemporary hip hop culture. Most centrally, Slim’s pimp pose foregrounds the relationship between black urban criminal “realness” and pop-cultural representation; or what Michael Eric Dyson calls the “essential constructedness” of the gangsta persona.¹² In addition, Slim’s literary career prefigures a post-soul model of authorship that accentuates material success, self-commodification, and the negotiation—or hustling—of dominant culture industries. Rather than reducing its subject to something more essentialist, Portrait of a Pimp engages Slim as both a cultural worker and a commodified image—or brand—of black urban masculinity. By examining Slim through the prism of popular culture and celebrity fandom, the film dramatizes its subject as a racial meta-identity that continues to impart cultural and commercial capital for post-soul artists. Chief among these is Ice-T, whose central involvement in the film both re-authenticates and diversifies his own brand as a black cultural producer. In this respect, I read Portrait of a Pimp as a text that moves both backwards and forwards; that simultaneously historicizes and proliferates a post-soul aesthetic.

Ill Parallels

Portrait of a Pimp recounts the remarkable story of the life of Iceberg Slim, a synopsis of which reads as follows: born Robert Lee Maupin in Chicago in 1918, Slim is raised by his mother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after his father abandons the family. In Milwaukee, his mother runs a beauty parlor and raises her son in relative comfort. However, this period of stability ends when Slim’s mother becomes involved with a conman who pressures her to return to the South Side of Chicago with him. Back in Chicago, Slim becomes enthralled with the world of street hustling, but nevertheless graduates from high school and is awarded a scholarship to Tuskegee College in Alabama. However, Slim is expelled after only a year for bootlegging on campus, and in 1937 embarks on a 25-year career as a pimp in Chicago and other Midwestern cities, during which time he acquires his “Iceberg” moniker. Over the course of this period, he is incarcerated a total of four times and becomes addicted to heroin and cocaine. In 1961, Slim renounces crime and relocates to Los Angeles (LA) to be with his ailing mother. In LA, he adopts the surname of his mother’s husband (Beck), and marries a white woman named Betty Mae Shue. By the mid-1960s, they have four children, and Slim supports his family by working as an exterminator. In an effort to supplement their income, Slim and Betty Mae co-author Pimp: The Story of My Life, and sell the memoir to Holloway House, an LA-based publishing company that specializes in “black experience” fiction. Pimp is released in 1967 and sells well within urban communities, and Slim becomes a minor celebrity owing to appearances on television talk shows and the college lecture circuit. Over the next 12 years, Slim and Betty Mae co-author four novels, a book of essays, and a collection of short stories for Holloway House. However, despite consistent book sales, the exploitative nature of Slim’s publishing contract forces him to return briefly to pimping in order to pay the bills. As his career declines in the late 1970s, his family life disintegrates, and he divorces Betty Mae and marries his second wife Diane. Following a series of diabetes-related illnesses, Slim dies in LA in 1992, penniless and estranged from his children.

Portrait of a Pimp recounts this story in chronological order, spending its first half detailing Slim’s pimping career, before moving on to his life as a writer and family man in LA. The film eschews a single heterodiegetic narrator in favor of multiple homodiegetic narrators, who take the form of on-screen interviewees. Rather than privileging an authoritative narrator “above” the story, Portrait’s narrators speak from their own subject positions as characters within the story itself.¹³ While these narrators include Slim’s family members, academics, and former colleagues, the early stages of the narrative are dominated by an array of well-known (male) admirers who discuss Slim’s legacy as a pimp and cultural icon. These contributors include such prominent African American cultural producers as the rapper Snoop Dogg, comedian Chris Rock, music producer Quincy Jones, and the film’s executive producer, Ice-T.¹⁴ As with Ice-T’s previous 2011 documentary The Art of Rap, these star contributors were emphasized in Portrait of a Pimp’s marketing, and were cited by director Jorge Hinojosa as lending the film both “credibility” and commercial appeal.¹⁵ However, a number of reviewers reacted negatively to their presence, variously suggesting that they “weighed down” the narrative, reduced the film to an exercise in “hero worship,” and ensured that Slim was viewed “from the safe distance of academia, fandom, and history.”¹⁶

While such criticisms may well be valid, I want to suggest that this narrative strategy imbues Portrait of a Pimp with a metacritical dimension that illuminates important aspects of the film’s production. By looking back at Iceberg Slim from a distance, the film opens up the key question of why his life story holds such significance for subsequent generations of black cultural producers. The film’s celebrity narrators could be said to belong to a “post-soul generation,” defined by Neal as “those folks, artists and critical thinkers […] who came to maturity in the age of Reaganomics and experienced the change from urban industrialism to deindustrialism, from segregation to desegregation, from essential notions of blackness to metanarratives of blackness.”¹⁷ Neal’s final descriptor is especially significant, as it suggests that a post-soul sensibility is marked by a profound distrust of black cultural “heritage” in any essentialist sense. The careers of Ice-T, Quincy Jones, and Chris Rock are conversely associated with a kind of relentless forward motion, versatility, and “crossover” success. To paraphrase Jeff Chang, these celebrities have not only moved from the “corner” of the ghetto to the “boardroom” of the entertainment industry, but have worked to popularize black urban cultural—and criminal—traditions within mainstream outlets.¹⁸ So why look backwards? Portrait of a Pimp thematizes this question. While Iceberg Slim stands as a bygone figure in one sense, his life story holds significance precisely because it is predicated on an ethos of enterprise and aspiration. His journey from ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire”
• PART I THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CRIMINAL IN CULTURE AND MEDIA
• PART II SLAVE VOICES AND BODIES IN POETRY AND PLAYS
• PART III REPRESENTING AFRICAN AMERICAN GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN POP-CULTURE AND SOCIETY
• PART IV BLACK CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN MUSIC AND DANCE
• PART V OBAMA AND THE POLITICS OF RACE
• PART VI ONGOING REALITIES AND THE MEANING OF “BLACKNESS”
• Afterword
• Index