The awarding of a best-soundtrack Oscar to the hip-hop group Three 6 Mafia for their tune "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" - in the pimp saga titled "Hustle And Flow" - is fraught with great risk: the honor dispensed means that song title will enter the modern lexicon as a sort of colonialist tool of subjugation, writes Washington Post essayist Philip Kennicott. He pictures fuddy-duddy white aunts trying out the line, "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp," at the dinner table, appropriating transgressive lingo yet blithely ghetto-izing grievances of the oppressed.

It's hard out here for a pimp, appropriated into white culture, becomes a way both to borrow the outsider's inherently cool status, while completely denying that any complaint from that place has value.

Brilliant, Philip: you've managed to conjure up a sort of "when did you stop beating your wife" test for anyone who dares to draw the line at sympathy for pimps, terrorists, cop-killers - or, like, whatever, dude. Judgmentalism; it's such a downer, Phil. More tax dollars, and hate speech protection for pimps, please. Why not Free Mumia into the bargain?

WaPo columnist Courtland Milloy has a different take on the pimping of The Oscars.

The recent conviction of Jaron R. Brice for pimping could have been accompanied by the Oscar-winning song, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." Except that only the most depraved audience would have sung along. Brice, 27, of Northeast Washington recruited girls as young as 14 with promises of friendship, family and security....Brice...groomed the girls into a "stable of sisters" and sent them off to have sex for cash with men in alleys, cheap motels and the back seats of cars. Every dollar went to Brice. Some of that also occurs in the movie "Hustle and Flow." But this latest black pimp tale has been artificially sweetened for crossover appeal. With the song as an accomplice, the audience gets tricked -- or pimped, if you will -- into feeling his pain.

Of course, songs and stories about black pimps are nothing new. But never before has the degradation of black women at the hands of stereotypically thuggish black men been so deeply engrained in popular culture. Through internationally marketed music videos, especially, African Americans have emerged as the only people on Earth who immortalize their mothers and sisters in the worst derogatory ways.

Brice now faces decades in prison after his conviction for sex trafficking of a minor, transporting prostitutes across state lines, pandering and child sexual abuse. Hard being a pimp. But what about the girls whose physical and emotional abuse condemns them to a life of bondage on the streets? "So many of them are lost souls," Lillian M. Overton, commander of the D.C. police youth division, told me. "They can only take so much abuse before they give up. It's like a form of suicide, because, for all intents and purposes, they are dead inside....They leave home, but often after they've already been discarded," Overton said. "Some don't even have missing-person reports on them because nobody cares." This is nothing to be celebrated in song.

Palm Beach Post columnist Stebbins Jefferson thinks the supposedly ironic point of the film is all too real to begin with, and made more so by the awarding of a soundtrack Oscar.

Watching the song being performed live on the stage of the Kodak Theater, I cringed as female dancers dressed as whores and males as pimps strutted about in a scene intended to show street hustling as a fun career option....The film Hustle & Flow (subtitled Everybody gotta have a dream) tells the story of a pimp who aspires to improve his lot by producing a top-of-the-charts rap recording. Playing the main character in this black (pun intended) comedy is super-talented actor Terrence Howard (who was also nominated for Best Actor). So powerful is his performance as DJay, a street-hustling, drug-dealing pimp, that one begins to root for his success. By drawing upon his life experiences in the mean streets of Memphis, he composes a catchy musical tribute about the occupational hazards of using women to make money for his rent and a Cadillac.

Boasting about the varied colors of his merchandise, he bemoans the tribulations of having to cope with the envy of "Niggaz" who hate him because he has three "hos on a tray." That, my friends, is what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Sunday night. The sinister irony of that fiasco is that when I saw Hustle, I came away fearing some might take the satire as a literal statement rather than an ironic comment on our whole society. How too often we are willing to do anything to make money and gain celebrity. How when mired in hopelessness, we tend to suck others in with us. And how all of us are complicit in these crimes because we create celebrities, and some elevate them and seek to emulate whatever they choose to do. The academy's choice for best original song proves that pimping comes in many forms.

How ironic is this? Time Magazine reports a number of feature films and documentaries about pimps and whores are being used as instructional films for girls and young women recruited into whoredom.

TECHNORATI TAGS: HUSTLE AND FLOW, THREE MAFIA 6, IT'S HARD OUT HERE FOR A PIMP, OSCAR, PHILIP KENNICOTT, COURTLAND MILLOY, STEBBINS JEFFERSON

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at March 21, 2006 11:40 AM