Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women

Introduction: Pimpin Ain't Easy, But Somebody's Got to Do It

1 introduction Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy, But Somebody’s Got to Do It This is a man’s world But it wouldn’t be nothing without a woman or a girl. —James Brown, “It’s a Man’s, Man’s World” Women are the weaker sex. . . . women’s bodies are made to attract and to please men. . . . now that women are equal, they should be able to accept being told that they aren’t, quite. —Harvey Mansfield, Manliness hen hip hop impresario Russell Simmons appeared at Hamilton College for an evening lecture on “Hip Hop, Culture, and Politics” in April 2004, no one could have anticipated the fallout. Simmons, considered a veritable maverick in the hip hop industry, cofounded with Rick Rubin the highly successful record label Def Jam. Under Def Jam, Simmons promoted and developed rap acts like Kurtis Blow, LL Cool J, and the first crossover rap triumvirate, Run DMC, in which his brother Joseph Simmons—the “Run” in the DMC—was also a member. He would later go on to establish another label, Russell Simmons Music Group. Setting up a quasi-entertainment and fashion empire through his company Rush Communications, Simmons’s entrepreneurial talents expanded to include a clothing company, Phat Farm, which was sold in 2004 to the tune of $140 million, soft drinks (DefCon3), television shows such as Def Comedy Jam, and a Broadway show with spoken word acts in Def Poetry Jam. The New York Times estimates that he sold his stake in Def Jam in 1999 for over $100 million to Universal Music Group. Indeed, his net worth hovers around $400 million. It is Simmons’s power moves and business acumen that set the pace and tone for the likes of Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and the more flamboyant Sean “Puffy” Combs. But all these accomplishments were not the reason for his invitation to lecture at Hamilton College. Russell Simmons is also the chairman of the Hip Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN). The year 2004 was a critical election year for many who were tired of the mendacity and chicanery of the Bush administration. Some were also openly smarting from the voter fraud and widespread black disenfranchisement in Florida in 2000. Simmons’s HSAN had voter registration among hip hop generationers and other political and social machinations as their mission, which included challenging the New York State Rockefeller drug laws as unethical, racially biased, and harshly punitive. His lecture morphed into a Q&A session, as he made a last-minute decision to stray from the contractual script toward a “just kickin’ it” dialogue. As with comedian Dave Chappelle’s bodacious, street-cred-upholding character in the skit “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong,” Simmons’s attempt at “keeping it real” fell flat. The result was a number of challenging questions from female audience members about hip hop culture, sex, and women. Introduction / 2 Riled by the television show BET Uncut, and specifically the rapper Nelly’s sexually provocative video “Tip Drill,” female students swapped volleys with Simmons. At one point he dismissively chided the students about being up at 2 a.m. —apparently, the so-called godfather of hip hop had forgotten the crucial late-night aspect of the college experience. He went on further to suggest that the students just “turn off their television sets,” an increasingly used line by corporate representatives when directly confronted by critics of such programming. Simmons’s argument had the effect of identifying him more with his lucrative financial interests than with his audience. The students, of course, could have easily turned off their television sets. But they were more concerned about the millions of other television sets (79,999,998 to be exact, given BET’s recent market penetration) that were left on, and the unpleasant gender politics and sexual provocations that continually flowed from them.1 One of the Hamilton students, a young woman, was especially agitated. While she was clearly misguided in her assertion that there were no networks devoted to promoting white culture (I sat mouth agape thinking about MTV, VH1, NBC, ABC, FOX, CBS, etc.), she nonetheless rightly zeroed in on hip hop culture’s contradictory relationship with women, and boldly declared that these videos impinged upon her sense of womanhood. As she fled the auditorium in a huff, Simmons delivered the “keep it street” coup de grace. He attempted to evoke empathy for the hard-knock life of so many...