Somebody Gotta Do It (Pimpin' Ain't Easy!!!) (Ice-T, 1987) (edited still)

AP-038 · SONGS AND RECORDINGS

Somebody Gotta Do It (Pimpin' Ain't Easy!!!) (Ice-T, 1987)

Ice-T's 1987 album track brought Iceberg Slim's pimp voice into West Coast rap and coined a phrase the culture still repeats.

Edited still: background removed, converted to black and white. Source: Vevo.

"Somebody Gotta Do It (Pimpin' Ain't Easy!!!)" appears twice on Rhyme Pays, Ice-T's debut album for Sire Records, released in 1987 and produced by Afrika Islam with Ice-T. The album version runs about three minutes; a longer "12-inch mix" closes the record and was pressed by Sire as a promotional 7-inch single (PRO-S-2868). Rhyme Pays reached the top 100 of the Billboard 200 and the RIAA certified it Gold on 12 December 1991. Critics at the time treated the album as the record that moved Los Angeles rap away from electro toward street narrative; "6 'N the Mornin'" is usually credited with founding gangsta rap, and "Somebody Gotta Do It" is its companion piece on the pimp side of the same economy.

The song is a monologue in the pimp's voice, structured as a complaint dressed as a boast: the narrator explains the work of recruiting and managing women, the money and the wardrobe, and insists that the job is harder than it looks. Its subtitle became a catchphrase, repeated in rap for decades and answered directly by later records, including those in this archive. The lyric draws its vocabulary from Iceberg Slim's 1967 memoir Pimp: The Story of My Life, and Ice-T took his stage name from the author.

Ice-T has been unusually candid about the line between persona and biography. Orphaned by the seventh grade and raised by an aunt in Los Angeles, he has said the only people who "had everything" around him were pimps and drug dealers, that he briefly "tested [his] hand in that game", and that he found he admired Slim as a writer more than as a pimp and decided to "document the game" on record instead. He has also described robbery and burglary in his early twenties, and he made these admissions to NPR in 1994 and again in 2011, and in his 2011 memoir. He later produced the 2012 documentary Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp, which examines the harm in Slim's story as well as the style.

What the sources establish, then, is a rapper who tried pimping briefly by his own account, rejected it, and built a body of work that reported on it. The 1987 song is the first widely distributed rap record to adopt Slim's persona whole, and the archive treats it as a founding document of the pimp strain in hip-hop: descriptive, ironic in its title, and already carrying the admission that the life is not what its costume promises.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Performed by Ice-T (Tracy Lauren Marrow); produced by Afrika Islam and Ice-T

STATUS
Living

ERA
1987–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
Los Angeles; Sire Records; Rhyme Pays; Iceberg Slim; Afrika Islam

STANDING
Documented

DOCUMENTED RECORD

1987 — Rhyme Pays released by Sire Records; produced by Afrika Islam; the track appears as an album cut and as a closing 12-inch mix.
1987 — Sire issues "Somebody Gotta Do It (Pimpin' Ain't Easy!!!)" as a promotional 7-inch (PRO-S-2868).
12 December 1991 — RIAA certifies Rhyme Pays Gold.
1994 — Ice-T tells NPR's Fresh Air he briefly attempted pimping and abandoned it.
2011 — Ice-T repeats the account on NPR's Talk of the Nation and publishes his memoir Ice.
2012–13 — Ice-T produces the documentary Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp.

NOT ESTABLISHED

Release date conflict: Wikipedia gives 28 July 1987; AllMusic lists November 1987.
The often-repeated claim that Rhyme Pays was the first album to carry a Parental Advisory sticker was not confirmed against a primary source.
The extent of Ice-T's own pimping is known only from his statements; no independent record exists, and he describes it as brief and unsuccessful.
Billboard chart peaks for the album (reported as No. 93 on the Billboard 200) come from Wikipedia's transcription; Billboard's site could not be opened.