Three 6 Mafia Cleans Up For the Oscars

Posted on March 2, 2006

Whitney Matheson of USA Today wondered how hip hop group Three 6 Mafia is going to approach their performance at the Oscars of their nominated song from Hustle & Flow, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"? After all, the FCC is so freaked out about on-air profanity that they are airing the show on a tape delay. The answer is: the group re-wrote a G-rated version of the song just for the Oscar telecast.

"We rewrote the song," said Mafia's Jordan "Juicy J" Houston. "We took out all the cuss words, dotted some i's and crossed some t's, and it's gonna be a clean show. You can let your kids watch it, and they don't have to wear earmuffs."
While this is Three 6 Mafia's first Oscar nod, their music previously surfaced in writer/director John Singleton's 2001 flick, Baby Boy. When Singleton needed a song to fit Hustle & Flow -- he served as the film's producer -- he turned to Houston. "John was like, 'Man, I need you to write this song for my movie. It's about a pimp having a hard time � His life is miserable, he's trying to get his demo tape heard and he's having a hard time with that,'" Houston says on the phone from New York, where he's having a suit made for Sunday's festivities. "And then they gave me a copy of the script, so we just read the script and we wrote the song."
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So does that mean Houston could return to the Oscars? "You never know," he says. "That's why I'm gonna do this clean, positive show, so they can maybe (say), 'Hey, this guy's not violent like we thought. We're gonna bring him back next year to do another song.'"

It's going to be an interesting show this year.