“Who's The Mack?”: The Performativity and Politics of the Pimp Figure in Gangsta Rap

Abstract

Mack: pimp; talk someone into something

“Pimptionary,” Ice-T

Mack man: Short for Mackerel man, a pimp. Possibly from the French maquereau. Connotes the working side of pimping, especially the line, the “rap,” the psychological game.

“Pimp Talk,” Christina and Richard Milner

Mack, as these definitions attest, is synonymous with pimp and is so deployed in gangsta rap as both noun and verb. From this denotative meaning, the term has assumed secondary meanings: to persuade, or as Ice-T says “to talk someone into.” The mack comes to mean the persuader, the trickster, the rapper. This semantic shift strikes at the centre of the equivalencies between rap artist and pimp. As music critic S. H. Fernando asserts, “the one specific quality that pimps and rappers share is their way with words.” If broad parallels can be drawn between pimping and rapping, what is distinctive about the notorious and highly successful subgenre of gangsta rap, which emerged in late-1980s urban California, is that here this equivalence is literalized. Many gangsta rappers actually assume pimp personae, presenting oral narratives which fulfil both denotative and connotative meanings of the word mack.