Mississippi: The Album, which features “Like A Pimp”, is single-mindedly ambitious in its effort to be the final say on David Banner’s home state. And then, a few seconds later, it’s sunny again, and he’s dangling a purple thong at the camera. Banner holds a hood with eyeholes in front of his chest like a trophy.
These scenes are not like the afternoon debauchery –– these are at night. Then there are the moments when Banner and a group of Black men in Seattle SuperSonics and Washington Bullets jerseys chase Klansmen away from white crosses that seem set up to be burned.
He returns to this image over and over again sometimes when Banner leaps forward, his image is digitally removed from the graveyard, so you can only see the noose. It opens with a two-second clip of Banner sprinting through a graveyard, a noose looming overhead, a shredded Confederate flag clinging to his frame.
But Banner decided to also intersperse “Like a Pimp” with something much, much darker. Shots of street signs at important intersections are rendered in black and white. Men grimace on stoops, pose with pit bulls. There are grimmer moments in the video, the kind that have marked rap videos going back to the ‘80s. In the edited version, they censor Flip saying “we run trains” but leave in his grinning “CHOO-CHOO” ad-lib. It feels strange that anyone would be listening to this song in the middle of the day. There’s some menace to the song, but the bright parts of the video are free and knowingly goofy: there are shots where Banner and Flip’s frames pass in front of the party scene as if on a green screen, and sometimes the video cuts to split-second, Powerpoint-quality inserts with single words on them (“sex,” “club,” “kiss”).
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