A New Meme

I must admit I didn't watch the Oscars...And I'm not really into rap music, despite my proximity to Detroit. But I thought this reading of the popularity of "It's Hard Being a Pimp" was culturally insightful. The full article is available from the Washington Post.

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 than 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 "playas," 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.

For instance, the ultimate egregious complaint: "It's not easy being beautiful." Or a close second, "Being rich isn't everything it's cracked up to be." These are complaints from people we envy, and belong to one category of self-delusion. The pimp complaint comes from another place, from someone deluded not by his success, but by his anti-social status. But all of these gripes elicit a sense of bemused outrage because they are complaints from someone who has no right to complain.

Perhaps the line has resonance because so much of American political discourse is about determining who is allowed to feel properly aggrieved. Is it Muslims offended about sacrilegious cartoons, or defenders of free speech seeing their high holy delimited? Daytime talk radio has essentially evolved into a vast trading floor for the commodity of complaint. And slowly we drift to a new understanding of the basic social contract: Your liberty ends where my outrage begins.