![]() ![]() In, he fleshes out the life of a man who went from pimp, to family man, to scholar to one of the early architects of modern-day hip-hop. Gifford is both highly detailed and reverent in his study into Beck’s life and his writing. In Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim, writer and professor Justin Gifford has written a book that is can be seen as a companion piece to Beck’s works. ![]() The book helped make Beck one of the most successful black writers of his time. ![]() Even though it was ignored by mainstream media – The New York Times wouldn’t even allow ads for it in the paper- Black America ate it up. But more than that, it was a way of writing about black life that had never been seen before. ![]() The book was the graphic, lurid tale of Beck’s life as a pimp and a con artist. Reflections returns to record stores on August 17th, 2018 via Modern Harmonic, on crisp icy clear vinyl in a gatefold jacket with freshened up artwork, new liner notes from Justin Gifford, author of Street Poison – The Biography Of Iceberg Slim, and a whole lot of profanity.In 1967, when Robert Beck published his memoir, Pimp: The Story of My Life, it was a game changer. The two most influential gangsta-style rappers, Ice-T and Ice Cube, both named themselves after Iceberg Slim, and they styled their anti establishment messages and hardcore confessionals of violent street life after Beck’s street fiction. Although he didn’t know it at the time, Beck’s works inspired the most powerful artistic response to America’s new police state: gangsta rap. The album closes with Beck’s most personal track, 'Mama Debt,' where he probes deeper into the psychological traumas and troubled childhood that led him to pimping and his incarceration. In his polished and riveting monologues, Beck spins spellbinding tales of the dark side of ghetto glamour-the drug addiction, the violence against women, and the street rivalries. Beck’s deep voice is full of velvety menace and combined with Holloway’s mellow riffs, the album has all the ambiance of a haze filled lounge. In 1976 Beck recorded Reflections, in which he recites four street poems accompanied by Red Holloway’s jazz quartet. To a wide range of readers Iceberg Slim is the definitive voice of black urban life and to his critics he is a misogynist who wrote trashy paperbacks that promote violence against vulnerable young women both outlooks have a degree of truth to them. There would have been no blaxploitation or hip-hop the way that we know them today without Pimp: The Story of My Life. Robert 'Iceberg Slim' Beck was a mess of contradictions whose works have transformed African American literature and culture. Those notes line the gatefold jacket which also holds the original liner notes, and some badass beat poetry on icy clear vinyl. Justin Gifford, author of Street Poison – The Biography Of Iceberg Slim, has penned a set of liner notes that help you grasp the immense cultural impact of this record and the hip-hop luminaries it inspired. A former pimp turned author, Iceberg Slim wrote Pimp: The Story of My Life, believed by some to be the highest selling book by a black author ever! On Reflections, the Red Holloway Quartet makes the bed, then Slim rhythmically speaks his prose like a bass note beat poet in what became the birth of the bad, dark, none-too-taboo tales of the street that inspired a subgenre of music. Reflections is the very explicit beat-jazz birth of gangsta rap. ![]()
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