This is a Suga Free appreciation post. Because Suga Free is some straight up hip hop and under appreciated.
Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the pimp image, which is clowned as feminine, or the pimpish lyrics, which are more than just borderline offensive at times (lyrics to “Unreleased” off of the album Sunday School… “now fuck her up and pick her up, just beat her up and pick her up, now kill her ass and let god pick her up” – will make you laugh then most likely go ‘….wait’). If you were to get lost in these aspects of Suga Free, you would be thrown off the fact that he can rhyme is ass off. Most often, the pimp is seen as a comical icon, a tragic clown, in popular culture. For evidence, you can just look at Don Magic Juan in the green leprechaun suit. Sometimes a pimp is seen as a realist’s hero or a bottom-up hustler too, but in mainstream White America’s eyes, the black pimp is a clown while the white corporate pimps are usually just killer businessmen. It’s fucked up but most people like to call their boy who slays mad broads pimps, but hate the sh*t out of a real pimp.
Now, with the no-nonsense moral crusader Eliot Spitzer put through the ringer in a public stoning, while his fine-as-hell call girl ‘Kristen’ was all the while being pimped by an intelligent, educated, former ‘good-girl’, we have to ask why the pimp gets rocks thrown at him (or in this case, her) while the trick is just a trick. Sure, the madam, by all means a pimp in her own right, who hooked ‘Kristen’ with the big gig took a road less traveled, and what she did was, at the end of the day, outside of the boundaries of legality. But the papers seemed unusually busy skewering her character for operating in a service that is illegal while she was also educated. When did the highly in-demand sex industry become blue collar and what does education have to do with the sex industry? Maybe it was that the public is uncomfortable with a woman being in that position of power, mastering the domain of sex in a fashion usually reserved for males – porn directors, pimps, etc., and making more money than she would have most likely made in a legitimate job. Or it could be because she worked outside most people’s realm of comfortable dinner conversation. But truth is, I think that’s what you call player hating, my friend.
I’m not glorifying a pimp, I’m just saying he or she has a role in society that, by sheer longevity, must be somehow necessary.
But coming back to Suga Free, probably the only true and honest pimp in the rap game. Suga Free’s knack for spitting game is talked about in this video by DJ Quik (at about 1:40).
With that rapid fire flow and the constant breaks into comic routines, exclamations, sing-songs, role calls, you can’t deny the dude’s versatility.
Also, when you see Kool Boy and West Coast Pop Lockers in this next video popping to the soundtrack of “Don’t Fight the Pimpin'” kind of highlights that while the content is unique to a pimp’s profession, his songs are nothing short of West Coast staples. Just look how good it goes with the scenery and the dance, buddy.
EXTRA CREDIT:
Suga Free – Doe Doe and the Skunk
With the original Loose Ends track – Nights of Pleasure
