Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Disclaimer: this post was written with LLM assistance; the ideas are mine, and I stand behind them
The Simp/Pimp Dialectic: Authenticity and Cultural Knowledge in 1980s-90s Hip-Hop
The term "simp" emerged in 1980s West Coast hip-hop not simply as the antonym of "pimp," but as a more nuanced critique of inauthenticity, cultural shallowness, and failed masculine performance. While contemporary usage has flattened the term into a simple insult for male submission to women, its original deployment by artists like Too Short, E-40, and Sir Mix-A-Lot encoded a sophisticated commentary on taste, realness, and the difference between genuine cultural knowledge and mere posturing. Understanding "simp" requires moving beyond the binary opposition of dominance versus submission and recognizing it as a term that could simultaneously attack both the fake player and the genuinely weak—united by their shared failure to embody authentic masculine competence within Black urban culture.
Too Short's description of a simp as a "knockoff pimp" is particularly revealing. The word "knockoff" suggests counterfeit goods—something designed to look like the real thing but fundamentally lacking in quality, craftsmanship, or authenticity. This framing positions the simp not as someone who has chosen a different path from pimping, but as someone attempting to inhabit that same space while failing utterly. The simp might put on the performance—talking the talk, claiming status, pursuing women—but lacks the genuine article beneath the surface. This interpretation aligns perfectly with hip-hop culture's broader obsession with "keeping it real" versus being exposed as fake, a distinction that could make or break an artist's credibility and, by extension, anyone's standing in the community.
Sir Mix-A-Lot's 1992 deployment of "simp" in "Baby Got Back" makes far more sense through this lens of authenticity versus superficiality than through any simple pimp/simp opposition. When he raps, "A lot of simps won't like this song / 'Cause them punks like to hit it and quit it / And I'd rather stay and play," he's not calling committed men simps—he's calling the "hit it and quit it" crowd simps because they're shallow, trend-following poseurs. These are men whose tastes have been colonized by mainstream (read: white) beauty standards, who chase after "Cosmo" ideals and "rock video" aesthetics rather than possessing the cultural depth to appreciate what Mix-A-Lot celebrates. They're fake because their desire is derivative, borrowed, inauthentic. They lack the connoisseur's eye, the deep cultural knowledge that would allow them to recognize and value what the mainstream dismisses. In this reading, the simp is culturally shallow—influenced by "skinny white girl culture" rather than grounded in authentic Black aesthetic appreciation.
Yet the term clearly also carried the "simpering weenie" meaning—the overly accommodating, submissive man who places too much value on women's approval and lacks the masculine self-possession that the pimp archetype embodied. This wasn't contradictory so much as it was targeting a different manifestation of the same fundamental failure: the absence of authentic masculine competence or "game." The 1992 Boyz II Men track "Sympin' Ain't Easy" captures this dimension, describing the degrading work of begging and pleading for female attention. Here the simp isn't pretending to be something he's not—he's genuinely weak, openly subordinate, transparently desperate. But both the fake player and the genuine weenie shared a common deficit: neither possessed real game, real knowledge, real cultural authority.
The semantic flexibility of "simp" allowed it to function as a catch-all critique of masculine inauthenticity in multiple registers. You could be a simp by being a poseur—someone trying to perform dominance or cultural knowledge you didn't actually possess. Or you could be a simp by being genuinely submissive—someone who had given up the performance entirely and openly accepted subordination. What united these uses was the fundamental assumption that authentic masculinity required a specific kind of cultural competence, self-possession, and freedom from both mainstream influence and female control. The pimp represented someone who had mastered this competence; the simp represented various modes of failure to achieve it.
This etymological complexity has been largely lost in the term's contemporary internet usage, which has reduced "simp" to a simple insult for male emotional availability or respect toward women. But the original 1980s-90s usage was far richer, encoding debates about authenticity, cultural capital, aesthetic discernment, and the performance of masculine competence within a specific subcultural context. The pimp/simp dichotomy wasn't really about control versus submission—it was about real versus fake, deep versus shallow, culturally grounded versus colonized by mainstream values. A simp could be someone faking dominance just as easily as someone genuinely submitting; what mattered was the failure to embody authentic masculine authority and cultural knowledge.
Personally--and ai may be alone here--I would prefer a poorly-worded, convoluted, even slightly ungrammatical-yet-readable post to anything made "with the assistance of LLM." I am not anti-LLM and don't think they're by default evil, but that's not why I come to theMotte.
I'm kind of halfway on this. I'm not against the usage of LLMs as a brainstorming tool that helps one come up with alternative wordings for passages already written (in fact I have done this myself at times for specific awkward sentences I've written that frustrate me, though with massive renovations to the wording and structure of the passage to make it fit within the overall style of writing I'm prone to), writer's block is a very big problem and sometimes usage of LLMs to brainstorm various different grammatical structures can get the creative juices flowing again. There's a legitimate use for LLMs in writing and I don't inherently object to the usage of it in posts on TheMotte. It’s utilising LLM as a tool and not as a wholesale replacement for effort.
As such I do find there's an admittedly ill-defined threshold where something becomes too LLM for me to ignore and the sort of overly sanitised prose that LLMs are prone to shows through to the extent that the writing loses all personality and originality; it's the feeling that someone has just taken huge chunks of text from an LLM without giving any thought to tone or style. This post certainly exceeds that threshold for me.
We can all converse with LLMs. There they are, we need only ask them a question (worded properly.) And they can, I agree, give reasonable, even "insightful" answers, if that is the word to use. I myself have gotten good advice from LLMs on issues as diverse as how to word an email in Japanese to what kind of fertilizer to use on the verbena (though ChatGPT abetted my murder of my olive tree.) The blossoming use of LLMs everywhere outside of mathematical or computational applications (in things like cooking, cleaning, shopping, stain removal, gardening, etc.) suggests considerable utility in their use. They are not evil.
My point is simply that when I open the Motte I prefer the warts-and-all version of humanity. (And often get it.) I should say, since I'm spouting off my druthers, that for my part I do not mind if people use LLMs for direct translation, though the non-English-native-speakers here tend to have far better written prose than most native speakers. My reasoning is that LLM direct translation is often very good, especially if calibrated for tone, and in such cases the original writing was, well, written originally by the writer.
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