Pimp of the Year (Dru Down, 1994)

Dru Down's Oakland pimp anthem spent 24 weeks on the Hot 100 in 1994–95, with a radio edit renamed "Mack of the Year".

"Pimp of the Year" was the lead single from Dru Down's second album Explicit Game, released in 1994 on Relativity Records. Dru Down, born Danyel Robinson and raised around 50th Avenue and Vicksburg in East Oakland, recorded the track with producer Ant Banks at Dangerous Music, the studio owned by Too $hort. Banks's mid-tempo funk production borrows from "Shorty the Pimp" by Don Julian and the Larks, the theme from the 1973 film of the same name, tying the record directly to the blaxploitation cycle that gave Bay Area rap much of its pimp vocabulary.

The song is a character sketch in the persona of a working Oakland pimp: the narrator lists the women he manages, the rules he enforces, and the wardrobe and cars the money buys, and it name-checks Fillmore Slim, the San Francisco pimp-turned-bluesman, and The Mack. Dru Down has said in interviews that his own family and the players he grew up around were the models, and that he saw the record as reporting on a world he knew rather than inventing one. In a 2021 interview he was direct about his own past: incarcerated at fifteen for attempted murder and robbery and released after three years, he came to rap through Oakland's underground tape economy.

The single was an unlikely national hit. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1994 and stayed there for 24 weeks, reaching the mid-60s, a rare feat for an independent Bay Area record with that title. Its popularity forced a radio edit retitled "Mack of the Year", with the violent lines removed. Complex placed it tenth on its 2011 list of the fifty greatest Bay Area rap songs, calling it an "unlikely hit". Dru Down later fell out with Too $hort and recorded a diss record, "Mista Busta", before the two reconciled; Too $hort has since brought him on stage to perform the song. The track and its video, with Dru Down in fur and jewelry surrounded by women, became the template for his career and for a Bay Area "pimp rap" lineage that runs through Too $hort, Suga Free and later artists.

The record carries the same caution as every entry in this classification. The song describes a pimp; it does not establish that its author was one. What the sources do establish is that Dru Down built a durable identity on the persona, running his own imprint, appearing in the 1996 film Original Gangstas, and continuing to record and tour into the 2020s as a member of the Regime collective.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Performed by Dru Down (Danyel Robinson); produced by Ant Banks

STATUS
Living

ERA
1994–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
East Oakland, California; Relativity Records; Ant Banks; Too $hort's Dangerous Music studio; The Luniz

STANDING
Documented