Word: pimped
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...captures its cheerfully vacant spirit ("I don't know what kind of drama awards we're gonna win," Caan says dryly). But old Vegas or new Vegas, says Caan, the town is an endless source of tales: "You can write a story about a king one week and a pimp the next...
Writing about the pimp, however, is more sensitive, with networks still cowering from the FCC's decency crusade. Just ask Casino executive producer Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice), who ran into interference from Fox's censors for, among other things, a scene in the show's debut featuring a stripper in a whipped-cream bikini. "If you don't have an accurate portrayal of what really goes on there," Burnett says, "it's hard to know where to turn. I'm not even allowed to put a naked body with blurs on it, which is what we do on Survivor...
There is, however, a car-country answer to Queer Eye: the car-and-bike makeover show. Discovery Channel's American Chopper, MTV's Pimp My Ride and several others turn junkers into sleek street machines and motorcycles into works of art, and in the process tell us how people (mostly men) express and define themselves through their stuff. They're Queer Eye, the shop-class version: the Gear...
...feels the connection between wheels and independence more strongly than teenagers, which is probably why Pimp My Ride became an overnight hit for MTV. With rapper Xzibit as host, it's a kind of hip-hop Queen for a Day. It takes young drivers' beat-up jalopies and turns them into rap-video dreams, rolling Xanadus with DVD players, video-game machines and the mandatory spinning-wheel rims. The show owes everything to the materialistic side of hip-hop culture, but Xzibit says that Pimp's fantasies are at least more accessible than the million-dollar house tours...
...suppose he's right. I also hope, though, that Pimp's viewers--watching a channel increasingly dedicated to the idea that a car, or a mansion, or a new pair of breasts, is the ticket to fulfillment--realize there are cheaper routes to self-esteem. "We're about to put $20,000 into a $900 car," a craftsman boasts as he rebuilds a pathetic Mitsubishi Mirage for Antwon, a 19-year-old art student. The gleaming, finished car is hilariously over the top (it includes a built-in fish tank), and Antwon is delighted. But I have to wonder: Wouldn...