Big Pimpin' (Jay-Z featuring UGK, 2000)

Jay-Z's Timbaland-produced hit sampled a 1957 Egyptian melody and spent eleven years in federal court before the Ninth Circuit closed the case in 2018.

"Big Pimpin'" was recorded for Jay-Z's Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter (December 1999) and released as a single in 2000. Timbaland built the track on a flute melody from "Khosara Khosara", composed by Baligh Hamdi in 1957 for the Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez. Jay-Z recruited the Port Arthur, Texas duo UGK; Bun B has recalled hanging up on the first call because he assumed it was a prank, and Pimp C, who had already declined a Jay-Z feature in 1998, said the beat "sounded like a pop record to me" and frightened him. He recorded anyway, delivering a verse dense with Texas references, and later refused to travel to Trinidad for the Hype Williams video, which was shot on a yacht during Carnival; his scenes were filmed separately in Miami.

The lyric is a celebration of the mack persona as lifestyle: money, travel, and women treated as interchangeable and disposable. It became UGK's highest-charting record, reaching No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100, topping Billboard's Rhythmic airplay chart, earning a Grammy nomination, and going on to a 3x Platinum RIAA certification on 4 December 2023. Jay-Z himself later disowned the words. Promoting his 2010 book Decoded, he told the Wall Street Journal that seeing the lyrics written down was "really harsh" and asked what kind of person would say such things, a rare instance of a major artist publicly regretting a pimp record.

The documented consequence is legal. In 2007 Osama Ahmed Fahmy, a nephew and heir of Hamdi, sued Jay-Z, Timbaland, EMI, UMG and MTV in the Central District of California, alleging the sample was never properly licensed. The record showed that Timbaland's side had paid EMI Music Arabia $100,000 in 2000 for rights the label held outside Egypt. The case reached a jury trial in October 2015; Jay-Z testified that he had not known the song contained a sample and had relied on the liner-note credit. On 21 October 2015 Judge Christina Snyder took the case from the jury, ruling that Fahmy had transferred his economic rights to an Egyptian businessman in 2002 and therefore lacked standing.

On 31 May 2018 the Ninth Circuit affirmed in a published opinion by Judge Carlos Bea, joined by Judges Consuelo Callahan and Paul Kelly. The court held that under Egyptian law the right to make derivative works is a transferable economic right, that Egyptian moral rights are not enforceable in U.S. federal court, which protects moral rights only for certain visual art, and that a retained royalty interest does not confer standing to sue for infringement. "That Fahmy retains moral rights in Egypt does him no good here," Bea wrote. The ruling is now a standard citation on moral rights and foreign copyright ownership, and it makes "Big Pimpin'" the pimp-titled record with the most thoroughly documented afterlife in American case law.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Performed by Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter) with UGK (Bun B and Pimp C); produced by Timbaland

STATUS
Living

ERA
1999–2018

ASSOCIATED WITH
Brooklyn; Port Arthur, Texas; Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam; Timbaland; Baligh Hamdi; Fahmy v. Jay-Z (9th Cir. 2018)

STANDING
Documented