Modern Harmonic - MH-8050 - 150 Gram Virgin Vinyl  - Pressed at RTI

With his polished delivery and smooth, almost soothing voice, Iceberg Slim could have been one of any number of beatnik poets, delivering elaborate monologues over smooth background music on 1976's Reflections. The difference is Iceberg Slim (neé Robert Beck) was a pimp, and his stories are scathingly explicit, and, more often than not, extraordinarily compelling.

 The language can get graphic; this is not an album for the squeamish. For those who aren't easily offended, though, this album will be spellbinding. Slim's skills as a storyteller cannot be overstated; even at his crudest, he still spins riveting yarns. "The Fall" is virtually autobiographical, depicting his last days as a pimp and what sent him on a downfall to prison, leavened with scabrous humor. "Broadway Sam" is a mean, hilarious story of another pimp who has the tables turned on him in prison. The second half of the record, though, is more poignant, as Slim remembers a lost love on "Durealla" and comes to terms with his relationship with his late mother on "Mama Debt."

 Throughout the record, Slim is backed by jazzy music courtesy of the Red Holloway Quartet, which enhances the stories without overshadowing them. Many years later, of course, Slim would serve as the inspiration for gangsta rappers like Ice-T (who named himself after Slim) and Schoolly D. Too many of Slim's followers, though, lack the mixture of street smarts and the intellectual and emotional depth shown here. For anyone interested in the roots of modern urban culture, Reflections is a must-hear.

Reflections is the very explicit beat-jazz birth of gangsta rap. 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. 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. Those notes line the gatefold jacket which also holds the original liner notes, and some

badass beat poetry on icy clear vinyl. Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck was a mess of contradictions whose works have transformed African American literature and culture. There would have been no blaxploitation or hip-hop the way that we know them today without Pimp: The Story of My Life.

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. In 1976 Beck recorded Reflections, in which he recites four street poems accompanied by Red Holloway’s jazz quartet. 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 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. 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. 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 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.