Mack: pimp; talk someone into something
“Pimptionary,” Ice-T
Mack man: Short for Mackerel man, a pimp. Possibly from the French
maquereau. Connotes the working side of pimping, especially the line, the “rap,”
the psychological game.
“Pimp Talk,” Christina and Richard Milner
Mack, as these definitions attest, is synonymous with pimp and is so
deployed in gangsta rap as both noun and verb. From this denotative
meaning, the term has assumed secondary meanings: to persuade, or as
Ice-T says “to talk someone into.” The mack comes to mean the
persuader, the trickster, the rapper. This semantic shift strikes at the
centre of the equivalencies between rap artist and pimp. As music critic
S. H. Fernando asserts, “the one specific quality that pimps and rappers
share is their way with words.” If broad parallels can be drawn between
pimping and rapping, what is distinctive about the notorious and highly
successful subgenre of gangsta rap, which emerged in late-1980s urban
California, is that here this equivalence is literalized. Many gangsta
rappers actually assume pimp personae, presenting oral narratives which
fulfil both denotative and connotative meanings of the word mack.