Song Of The Day 1/20/2015: The Skull Snaps - "I'm Your Pimp"

Northern Soul Week: Considering the nature and chronology of this particular number I should probably come clean about where I got a lot of the material for this week: Not having been a resident of the Northern British cities in which this style found its favor, I relied on a couple of playlists and anthologies put out by people who, I'm blindly trusting here, did live in Manchester, or Stoke-on-Trent, or wherever Northern Soul took flight in the late '60s and early '70s. They had quite a few songs in common, and some that they had all to themselves.

That said, here's "I'm Your Pimp" by the Skull Snaps. Somebody put this on their Northern Soul playlist. It doesn't not fit. Unbelievably, this song dates to 1973. "I'm your pimp! I wear my hat to the side, and walk with a limp!" That's the chorus. It's not an easy lyric to take ("If I wanna curse, slap or hurt you, just turn the other cheek"), and even less easier considering that a lot of Northern Soul was suspended in lovelorn dreamland in which singers romanticized either their partners or the act of dancing. The rough-hewn street preaching and protest of late-era Temptations, which this almost copies blow by blow, supposedly fell a bit outside Northern Soulland's concerns. So maybe it shouldn't even be on this damn theme week, but it's a strangely powerful, let's hope cautionary, scared-straight kind of tale that I felt should be shared.

And also, honestly, that chorus is pretty great. I think I'm going to use that as my new signature at work.