P.I.M.P. (50 Cent, 2003)

50 Cent's steel-drum pimp anthem hit No. 3 in 2003; its Snoop Dogg remix put Chicago's Don "Magic" Juan before a mass audience.

"P.I.M.P." was the third single from 50 Cent's debut album Get Rich or Die Tryin', released by Shady, Aftermath and Interscope on 24 June 2003. The album itself had opened at number one in February 2003 on first-week sales of more than 872,000 copies. The track was produced by Denaun "Mr. Porter" Porter of D12 and mixed by Dr. Dre. Porter has said in interviews with Complex that he built the beat in Detroit with engineer Brandon Parrott, that it came from the same batch of instrumentals as "Multiply", and that 50 Cent initially assumed Dr. Dre had made it. Porter described aiming for a "Big Pimpin'" feel, and the record's Caribbean-flavored steel-drum hook set it apart from the rest of the album.

The lyric is a first-person boast in the pimp persona: the narrator describes controlling women who work for him, refusing to spend money on them, and treating the arrangement as a business. It is persona, not biography; nothing in the public record indicates 50 Cent ever worked as a pimp, and the song sits within a long tradition of rap adopting the mack voice inherited from 1970s film and from Iceberg Slim. A 2006 interview cited in secondary accounts has 50 Cent saying he recorded a sequel, "P.I.M.P. Pt. 2", for The Massacre (2005) that Dr. Dre rejected.

The song's cultural footprint came largely through its remix and video. The remix added Snoop Dogg, Lloyd Banks and Young Buck, and its spoken introduction and video appearance featured Bishop Don "Magic" Juan, the Chicago former pimp who founded the Players Ball and had become Snoop Dogg's self-described spiritual advisor. The video, directed by Chris Robinson, stages a pimp council presided over by Snoop's character, with 50 Cent auditioning for membership: green-and-gold suits, canes, goblets and the Players Ball iconography that Don Juan had carried into hip-hop. It premiered on MTV's Total Request Live in July 2003 and was nominated for Best Rap Video at the 2004 MTV Video Music Awards. Two edits of the video circulated, one containing partial nudity and a clean broadcast version.

Commercially the single peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and charted top five in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany and Australia. The RIAA certified it Gold in June 2006 and 3x Platinum on 19 January 2023, and it has become one of 50 Cent's most-streamed recordings. Its afterlife includes a steel-band cover by Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band used prominently in the 2023 film Anatomy of a Fall.

The one legal consequence attached to the record concerns credit, not content. In 2016 Brandon Parrott and his business manager sued 50 Cent, Porter, UMG, Interscope, Aftermath, Shady and EMI, alleging Parrott had been fraudulently induced to sign away rights to the instrumental he co-created. U.S. District Judge S. James Otero dismissed the complaint in November 2016 as time-barred, finding no reasonable composer could have relied on the statements alleged. Porter has said publicly that he tried to secure Parrott a publishing credit and that label processes kept Parrott's name off the release.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Performed by 50 Cent (Curtis James Jackson III); written by Curtis Jackson and Denaun Porter

STATUS
Living

ERA
2003–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
Queens, New York; G-Unit; Shady/Aftermath/Interscope; Snoop Dogg; Bishop Don "Magic" Juan; Players Ball imagery

STANDING
Documented