![]() You have this larger than life character as your centerpiece, yet Simone Sello and CunninLynguists flooded the film with monotonous tones and beats. That creativity should have been used on the film's score. It was a distracting, creative gimmick that failed to add a hint of value. Despite her disastrous parenting, Slim yearned for her acceptance, and it fueled his quest to be a legitimate success.Ī major quibble I had was the diptic style picture cropping used during the Becky interviews. Professors and historians often speak about Slim’s tumultuous relationship with his mother. His literary works are what garnered the respect Chris Rock, who gifts Pimp to the cast and crew on all his films. This prompted a glossary of pimp terms to be added, and allowed the opportunity for crossover appeal. However, the book almost never made it to print because the pimp vernacular was unknown to his white publisher. Never had anyone articulated the grittiness of pimp life with such prose. His first book, Pimp: The Story of My Life was a smash. He recited the stories of his past while she notated his words on a typewriter. Slim's first wife, Becky, was the instrument for his rebirth. Upon his release, he left a changed man and vowed to go straight. You could sense he was a man at the end of his rope. The animation used to depict Slim's inner torture while in solitary confinement created a visceral experience for me. He finally hit bottom when he found himself in Leavenworth prison at the age of 26. The trials and tribulations of the game led to cocaine and heroine addiction. Everyone wanted to dethrone the great Iceberg Slim. From Cadillac’s tutelage, Iceberg Slim matriculated into one of the baddest pimps in Chicago.īeing king of the pimp game was akin to being king of Westeros in Game of Thrones. Back in Chicago, he was taken under the wing of known pimp, Cadillac Baby Bell. ![]() During a brief jail stint (the first of many), Slim was schooled on the pimp game. He had the uncanny ability to remember every purchaser’s numbers, without writing them down. With no stability at home, Slim took the streets running numbers (the hood lottery), a popular game in those times. Watching him plead for Slim’s mother, who had taken up with another man, was one of the driving forces into the making of Iceberg. The image of the only man he ever trusted and loved was tainted. As a child, Slim watched as his stepfather was cuckolded by his absentee mother. This appealed to a young Slim, who wanted to be in on the action. Hinojosa uses old photos to illustrate 1940s pimps as they peacocked up and down the street, dressed in the finest suits, shoes polished, and sporting the hairstyle of a well to-do black man, the conk. Their depravity was bleached with free turkeys on Thanksgiving and presents on Christmas – black Robin Hoods. In the black neighborhood, pimps were the local celebrities. It was a virtual Wild West, where organized crime was rampant and gangster mentality, the zeitgeist. Iceberg Slim, born in 1919, grew up in a riotous Chicago. But how did a man, raised by a single mother, become this version of a man? Could a man like this truly be redeemed? Director Jorge Hinojosa, along with Slim’s family members, Chris Rock, Snoop Dogg, and various professors attempted to answer that question. ![]() For his services, he collected every dime earned and the right to put a boot in a woman’s back if she needed to be checked. Iceberg’s occupation was to serve as the Machiavellian master to these women, provide them "comfort", protection, and occasionally sex. He had a stable of women in his “employ” who worked the track, 24/7, selling their bodies for money, and losing their soul in the process. ![]() He was the pimp we saw romanticized in blaxploitation movies or satirized in “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka”. But Iceberg was no pushy used car salesman talking you into buying a six year old lemon. If you have ever been persuaded to do something you normally wouldn’t do, well, you’ve been pimped. According to some, pimping, in its truest form, happens to all of us. Rappers love invoking his name as they wax lyrically of their powers over women. ICEBERG SLIM: A PORTRAIT OF A PIMP details the uneasy life of notorious pimp, Iceberg Slim (nee Robert Beck), probably the most famous pimp to ever enter the game.
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