Pimpin' Ken

Turned the subculture's coercive methods into a mass-market self-help book — and into the model for how it gets sold.

Ken Ivy, who works publicly as Pimpin' Ken, is the most commercially successful and the most thinly documented of the men who became visible during the late-1990s mainstreaming of pimp imagery. His publisher records a 1964 birth in Chicago and a street reputation built across Chicago and Milwaukee, including a "Mack of the Year" award at the Players Ball. That award and the Ball itself are the only markers of his pimping career for which published documentation exists. The scale, the duration and the specifics rest on his own account.

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His entry into mainstream media came through HBO. His publisher credits him as a consultant on the network's documentaries; the cast listing for the Hughes brothers' American Pimp names him among the interviewed subjects. The two are not the same credit, and the archive does not assert either without qualification. He went on to appear in rap videos and was profiled in The Source and Vibe.

In 2008 Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, published Pimpology: The 48 Laws of the Game, written with the journalist Karen Hunter. The book repackages the coercive techniques of pimping as a framework for business and personal relationships. That move is the single most useful thing about it for a researcher: it is the clearest documented instance of the subculture being reformatted for a general readership, and the mechanism by which the reformatting avoids any accounting of the women involved.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Ken Ivy

BORN
Chicago, Illinois, 1964 (publisher-supplied)

STATUS
Living

ERA
1980s–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
Chicago and Milwaukee

STANDING
Partly documented