Pimp Juice (Nelly, 2002) and the Pimp Juice energy drink

Nelly's 2002 album cut became a 2003 energy drink whose name drew a national boycott from Black civil-rights and faith groups.

"Pimp Juice" appeared on Nelly's second album Nellyville, released 25 June 2002 by Universal and Fo' Reel. The album opened at number one on the Billboard 200 with roughly 715,000 first-week sales and was certified six-times Platinum by the RIAA on 9 June 2003; its singles "Hot in Herre" and "Dilemma" won Grammys in 2003. "Pimp Juice", produced by St. Louis producer Jason "Jay E" Epperson, was issued as the album's fourth single in the United States on 10 March 2003, with a video and a remix featuring Ronald Isley. It was a modest chart entry beside the album's two number ones.

Unlike the harder pimp boasts of the same period, Nelly's song redefines the term. In his own explanation on MTV's Total Request Live, quoted by Washington University's student paper, "pimp juice" is whatever a person uses to attract the opposite sex, and the lyric argues that women have it too. The song is a flirtation, not a description of managing sex workers; its controversy came from the word rather than the content.

In the summer of 2003 Nelly's company launched a non-carbonated apple-flavored energy drink named after the song, produced by Fillmore Street Brewery in St. Louis. Within weeks a coalition of Black organizations, including Project Islamic HOPE, the National Alliance for Positive Action led by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, the National Black Anti-Defamation League and the Rev. Paul Scott's Messianic Afrikan Nation, announced a national boycott of the drink and of retailers carrying it. Their objection, as reported by Voice of America in December 2003, was that the product glorified pimping and reinforced demeaning stereotypes of Black men and women; Hutchinson called it "insulting and demeaning to African-American females". The company's representatives answered that in contemporary usage "pimp" meant something closer to "the man" and that proceeds would benefit Nelly's 4Sho4Kids charity.

The boycott did not stop sales. In January 2004 the company reported more than a million cans sold in just over three months, initially through online orders and music-retail chains, and by May 2007 it claimed 2.4 million cans a month while licensing production in South Africa. The brand faded later in the decade; no reliable source documents a formal discontinuation date. The episode matters to this archive less for the song than for what it showed: by 2003 the word had been detached far enough from its meaning to sell a soft drink, and a section of the Black civic leadership refused to let that pass unremarked.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Performed and written by Nelly (Cornell Iral Haynes Jr.); produced by Jason "Jay E" Epperson

STATUS
Living

ERA
2002–2007

ASSOCIATED WITH
St. Louis, Missouri; Nellyville; Fillmore Street Brewery; Project Islamic HOPE; National Alliance for Positive Action

STANDING
Documented