Pimpin' the Oscars

Posted at 10:08 AM on March 7, 2006 by John Zech
Filed under: The blog

The morning after the Oscars my wife was playing tennis and having trouble with her serve. Her doubles partner, a woman in her 50s, reassured her by saying, "it's hard out here for a pimp."

I doubt this woman had been listening to Three 6 Mafia on the way to the club, but she knew about the song.

As a tangent to John Birge's entry on the decline and fall of the Best Song winners at the Oscars, I've been fantasizing about Itzhak Perlman doing a "classical" arrangement of "It's Hard Out Here For a Pimp." I think it would work...at least as well as the medley of film scores he played at the Academy Awards on Sunday night.

The arrangement Perlman played bore no relationship to any of the sounds or textures of the original scores (at least none I could make out). In fact, I think it was worse than nothing at all.

Was the Academy pimping Perlman with this pseudo-classical mishmash?