The dress is black and blue and also Pimp My Ride was a baldfaced fallacy.
That second bit in particular is the gist of a stirring and lengthy dissertation on the Huffington Post today, one revealing that much of what you thought to be sacred and aspirational about popular mid-aughts daytime TV stalwart Pimp My Ride was little more than a whopping lie: an elaborate ruse perpetuated by Xzibit and legion MTV producers who willingly exploited the trust of their victims for the express purposes of enacting a malicious entertainment agenda.
Or, ‘Reality TV is not actually real’ – who could’ve predicted such a thing?
Speaking with three of the show’s unwitting alumni, the Post begin with a litany of testimonials that claim modifications made to the cars were, unsurprisingly, often just for show and would be removed as soon as filming wrapped. A drive-in theatre; a cotton candy machine; a pop up champagne contraption; 24-inch spinner rims; a robotic arm that at first appeared to operate independently was actually “controlled by commands that were entered into a laptop by the spiky haired guy off screen.”
All of them, lies.
Participants often had to wait inside homes rented by MTV while they awaited ‘surprise’ arrival of Xzibit and were often lured there with the promise of $100 gift certificates. Again, unsurprisingly when you consider how hammy the show was, their reactions too were often doctored. Says one:
“I remember this very clearly, Big Dane, very big dude, he like puts his arm around my shoulder, kind of walks me around the shop for like 10 minutes and he’s like, ‘Listen, we put a lot of work into this … we expect you to be a little more fucking enthusiastic.’”
More nefariously, participants often had to surrender use of their cars for six months at a time and were forced to rent substitutes at their own expense. More still allege that producers tried to go one step further and pimp their lives, compelling one to dump his girlfriend so he’d look more pathetic for the episode’s narrative; another had two bags of candy dumped in his car and was told to act as if he always had it there in case he got hungry.
In spite of all that – and more – everyone the Post spoke with said they’d happily partake of the Pimp My Ride experience again, concluding that Xzibit “did smell of [weed]. A lot of it” and that one weekend “[Xzibit] said he’s going to go down to hell to kill the devil so he can make some Satan skin boots.”
And just like that, balance was restored to the world.
