debbie m. price

What he's too short on is brains and common decency

This column includes language that will offend some readers.

So I go into Sound Warehouse and what do I see but Too $hort's latest album, Shorty the Pimp, displayed big as you please inside the front door as the store's No. 1 best seller for the week. Sound Warehouse, you may recall, was one of the record stores that pulled Ice-T's Body Count album after police groups, upset by "I'm 'bout to dust some cops off . . . die, pig, die," threatened a boycott of Time-Warner Inc. I happened to notice Too $hort's most recent offering, which, by the way, hit No. 6 on the Billboard charts, on the same day that Ice-T said he was taking the offending Cop Killer song off the Body Count album because of death threats.

I guess it is one thing to sing about body counts and another thing to want to be one. Which brings us back to Too $hort.

Too $hort sings about being a pimp. His publicist, Miguel Baguer, says that of course, Too $hort doesn't actually want to be a pimp nor does he think that pimps are good guys. He's just parodying "this whole pimp mentality, you know, the black male self-esteem thing. It's a cultural reality."

In real life, Too $hort, whose name is Todd Shaw and whose parents are middle-class Oakland accountants, "loves women and treats them like gold," Baguer says.

Not that you might get a different idea from listening to his rap songs.

Shorty the Pimp has that itty, bitty Parental-Advisory-Explicit-Lyrics sticker on the front. Calling these lyrics explicit is like saying you might get hurt if you walk in front of a bullet train. We're talking one big ellipsis here.

Newspapers don't normally print such talk, which, if you ask me, puts these rapper-guys at an unfair advantage over their critics. As long as we can't tell you what these guys really say, their slick publicists can get away with burbling on about black male self-esteem and parody and cultural reality — not to mention square white people who, as Bageur puts it, find Too $hort "easier to slam than understand."

A four-letter vocabulary is not hard to understand.

What we are talking about is verbal pornography and some of the most vile and degrading-to-women stuff to come down the pike in a long time.

Which is why we're going to share some of it with you in this column.

My editor asked me to warn you that what you are about to see in the succeeding paragraphs is not the kind of language that you would normally find in this newpaper and that if you are the least bit squeamish or inclined to write letters to the editor, you ought to turn to the crossword puzzle straight away.

For our first number, we turn to the song Hoes. These, by the way, are not the same kind of hoes you use in the garden.

"I need a bitch . . . a full-time tramp. She can't suck (male body part) like she's licking a stamp, but she can lick it all around and swallow it whole . . . ."

Catchy rhyme.

Or how about this one from the hit No Love from Oakland, written and sung by a guy who "loves women and treats them like gold?"

"I'm from Oakland, bitch, and you can take my rap. Out here, fake bitches get slapped."

And the cops didn't like "die, pig, die." Where's Bella Abzug when you need her?

Clarence Thomas gets hauled before the Senate Judiciary Committee and grilled on television for alleged remarks about a porn star and a hair on a Coke can. All of America is in a tizzy about sexual harassment. The Democrats go on and on about the Year of the Woman in politics. And Shorty the Pimp sells 200,000 copies in the first two weeks after it is released?

What does that tell you?

But hey, men who love women and treat them like gold always call their gals dim-head bitches, rich bitches, with-it bitches, nasty bitches, square bitches, fake bitches, big sluts, neighborhood trampy sluts and hoes. Hard to think of anything nicer to say to a woman than: "So what, bitch? I popped her cherry. Hell (expletive) no, I don't want to get married."

And I can't think of a better way to deal with this black-male self-esteem thing than to make an album about a pimp.

Of course, Too $hort isn't, as Baguer says, "trying to teach kids or direct them in any way. He's providing entertainment."

But the best thing about the tape is that it makes people want to buy a Jeep.

No kidding. Just ask Baguer.

"People love this. It's a very West Coast thing. It's great for the Jeep. It makes you want to have a Jeep, to go out and cruise. With the top down. Stereo up. Man, every time I listen to this, I want to go out and buy a Jeep."

Can't you just hear the background music now for the next Chrysler commercial?

I got my mother (expletive) top down and my mother (expletive, body part) up and my dim-head (expletive) where I want her cause I'm Shorty the Pimp and I drive a Jeep.

Uh-huh.

Debbie M. Price's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.