Amid the pimp mythologies and metaphors that gut contemporary hip hop, rappers like Common and Xzibit in his wildly popular MTV series Pimp My Ride, devoted to upgrading broken-down automobiles seize on pimpology's prominence to poke fun at its pervasiveness.

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Along with the spots there will be 11 celebrity endorsements by the likes of Enrique Iglesias and Shaggy, two documentaries about climate change and an eco-friendly episode of Pimp My Ride in which a '65 Chevy Impala gets an 800-horsepower diesel engine that runs on biodiesel.

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It instead makes its own content--primarily reality shows like Laguna Beach and Pimp My Ride--and finds itself in the same quandary as other owners of entertainment assets: struggling to find a way of maintaining control of its product when so much of it can be had for nothing on the Internet.

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