![]() It’s also a book that never quite crossed over to the mainstream - it still remains an underground classic. The style of those books is so brutal and unrelenting the vernacular is so specialized that there’s a glossary at the back of “Pimp.” The book has a Shakespearean quality to its language and drama. That book “Pimp” in particular is an incredible resource for writers and entertainers and those working in the imaginative arts. What’s drawn people like Ice Cube and Chris Rock to Slim and his work? What do they see in him? Jay Z, when he got his start, also referred to himself as Iceberg Slim, and Slim’s name comes up in a number of hip hop songs, by Notorious B.I.G., to Nas, to underground rappers.Īnd then there’s other kinds of black cultural phenomenon, like comedy – Dave Chapelle, Katt Williams and others will routinely cite Iceberg Slim or “Pimp.” Chris Rock, at the wrap of every single one of his movies, will hand out a copy of “Pimp” to the cast and people working in the film, and tell them that all of the answers to life can be found in this book. The same goes for Ice Cube: He also took his name from Iceberg Slim and was a big fan of the books. Ice-T was one of the newcomers on the scene - he took his name as an homage to Slim and created a lucrative career as a pioneering gangsta rapper. Hip hop was just starting to take off - this was the age of Grandmaster Flash and Run D.M.C. He'd put out a spoken word album in the late ‘70s, “Reflections.” In terms of the stuff that comes after, he had a massive impact on hip hop in the early ‘80s. ![]() You could think about his books as the literary equivalent, and cornerstone of, the blaxploitating genre. ![]() White screenwriters would often lift things directly out of his books, whether characters or the lingo he used or the streetwise style of his books. When it comes to him writing “Pimp,” that had a direct impact on blaxploitation films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, partly because of his novel "Trick Baby" being made into a blaxploitation film. ![]() It’s funny – you could probably say that Iceberg Slim is better known in the popular consciousness through his by-products than by his actual works. Can you give us a sense of his impact in movies, music, fiction, and elsewhere? Let’s start with Iceberg Slim’s legacy and then double back to the life. The conversation has been edited slightly for clarity. We spoke to Gifford, a professor at the University of Nevada at Reno, about the writer, the legacy and the life. Gifford’s taut biography is important and overdue,” Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times, calling the biographer “a dogged researcher who arrives at a somewhat unexpected conclusion: The stories in ‘Pimp’ are mostly true.” Justin Gifford’s “Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim,” has just been released. In terms of that influence he’s probably the most dominant writer since Shakespeare.” Scottish writer Irvine Welsh has written that Slim “massively influenced popular culture through music and film. Slim died in 1992, as the Los Angeles riots raged near his home, at the age of 73. He also published several novels, including “Trick Baby,” made into a 1972 blaxploitation movie. His vivid and relentless autobiography, “Pimp: The Story of My Life,” from 1967, tells of the quarter century the author (born Robert Lee Maupin he later became Robert Beck) spent running women, both black and white, in several Midwestern cities and often with very little apparent empathy or outward emotion. Iceberg Slim is an influential cult writer who many readers have never read.
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