Like a Pimp

The Mississippi record that made pimp swagger a crunk-era crossover and bought David Banner a major-label deal.

"Like a Pimp" is the 2003 single by the Jackson, Mississippi rapper and producer David Banner, featuring Houston's Lil' Flip, from his major-label debut Mississippi: The Album (SRC/Universal). Banner produced it himself around a sparse, bass-heavy loop; the chorus interpolates UGK's "Take It Off" (2001) and the New Orleans bounce standard "Drag Rap (Triggerman)." It reached number 48 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 15 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, appeared over the opening credits of 2 Fast 2 Furious, and was remixed with Busta Rhymes and Twista on MTA2: Baptized in Dirty Water. According to The Fader's 2019 retrospective, the video's regional buzz preceded Banner's reported $10 million deal with Steve Rifkind's SRC and Universal.

The song uses "pimp" the way the early 2000s South did, as a posture: to walk, spend and be looked at like a pimp, with no women managed and none named. What set the record apart was its video, directed by Bernard Gourley, which cut daytime club scenes and dancers in Mississippi "601" jerseys against black-and-white footage of stoops, graveyards, nooses and Confederate flags, and a sequence in which Black men chase Klansmen from a burning cross. The Fader called it the embodiment of Banner's conflicting impulses, "afternoon debauchery" and racial history in the same three minutes.

The record belongs here as an instance of the word detached from the trade and reattached to place and pride, and as a UGK interpolation that carried Pimp C's phrasing into the pop chart.

ALSO KNOWN AS
David Banner (Lavell William Crump); Lil' Flip (Wesley Eric Weston Jr.)

ERA
2003

ASSOCIATED WITH
Jackson, Mississippi; SRC/Universal; Lil' Flip; UGK; 2 Fast 2 Furious

STANDING
Documented