It amazed me to see figures I read about in Beck’s work come to life in pictures, especially being that this activity took place so long ago, in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s primarily.
In short, it’s a portrait of the man that humanizes him even more than his literature already served to.įor anybody familiar with Slim’s work, the documentary does the amazing work of adding flesh to the stories Iceberg told in “Pimp: The Story of My Life.” The film actually shows pictures of several key figures in Beck’s life, from his mother, to his mother’s boyfriend Henry Upshaw, to the woman who turned him out, Pepper Hibbits, to his nanny who sexually molested him as a boy, Maude. Instead, the documentary is a cradle to grave portrait of Robert Beck the man, tracing his life from his youth, the disappointments that led him into being a pimp, his jail sentence, his relatiionship with his mother, wife, and children, as well as his success as an author and his reclusive death in the early 1990s. The documentary “Portrait of a Pimp”, directed by Jorge Hinosa and Executive Produced by Ice T, as well as featuring him as a talking head, is not based on Iceberg Slim, real name Robert Beck’s, life as a pimp. When T was introduced through hip hop through the Sugarhill Gang’s landmark 1979 “Rappers Delight”, it was the pimp verbiage of Iceberg Slim he turned to to write his own raps. Ice T the MC, actually came at rapping, MCing, and hip hop, through the works of Iceberg Slim, quoting whole sections of his books along with other hustler rhymes. His books were known for an unflinching, unglamorized portrait of black street life in World War II and post War America. Of course, before I was even born, Iceberg Slim’s books had caused a stir in the urban community. In reality, only his first book, “Pimp: The Story of My Life” was about pimping, his other books told stories of con men of all colors, and his ouevere even included a book called “Mama Black Widow”, which was an empathetic portrait of a black homosexual named Otis Tilson. Iceberg Slim was famous for being the primary writer to escape the world of pimping and writing stories about it in great detail. They were all over barber shops, heavily marked up and checked out of school and public libraries, and constantly referenced by people in the neighborhood. Iceberg Slim’s books were very familiar to me growing up in Oakland, California in the 1990s. “Portrait of a Pimp” takes us into the life story of Ice-T’s primary influence, the pimp turned author Iceberg Slim. The first documentary Ice T did in this vein was his hip hop documentary, “The Art of Rap”, which took us into the technique’s and motivations of rappers. It’s the same discharching of ideological debt that Snoop Dogg has constantly repaid and that the RZA accomplished by finally making his own kung fu flick, “The Man with the Iron Fists”, instad of sampling them. Ice T has done some very special film work over the past few years, chronicling the influences that made both his rap career possible, and exposing some of the roots of hip hop.
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