Saturday, March 11, 2006

Culture of Complaint                   Before you come to a hard position on Oscar-winning song "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," check this essay from Philip Kennicott at the Washington Post. (hat tip to Oliver at Poplicks) Here's a bit: Why this song? Why now? When "white" culture borrows from "black" culture, it doesn't necessarily borrow what it thinks it's borrowing. The real meaning of the song, its reference to pimps, its role within a movie documenting the often pathetic efforts at stardom of a pimp who also makes music, isn't particularly relevant. When a piece of cultural stuff makes the transition into the mainstream, it often does so on terms entirely different from what it originally meant. In this case, it's because the song's most catchy line, "It's hard out here for a pimp," captures the peculiar quality of complaint without merit in American cultural life. We all complain, and complaint has so cluttered our rhetorical landscape that we mostly tune out the din of gripe -- except, of course, for our own complaints, and the egregiously unmerited complaints of people we don't like. Despite the evolution of the word "pimp" to loosely embrace all manner of "playahs," and a celebration of "pimp style" (see: "Pimp My Ride"), most of us still don't like real pimps. So pimps who complain that "It's hard out here" can stand for all those people who complain willfully, scandalously, about things they have no right to complain about. -RH 11:40:39 AM    comment []

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