’Cause it’s the real shit, shit to make you feel shit’1
– ‘Quiet Storm,’ Mobb Deep feat. Lil’ Kim
To understand why the world of hip hop needed and conceived ‘Lil’ Kim’ (or why Lil’ Kim needed to create herself), one need only recall DMX’s iconic line from his hit song ‘What They Really Want’: ‘There was Brenda, Latisha, Linda, Felicia, Dawn, LeShaun, Ines and Alicia, Theresa, Monica, Sharon, Nicky, Lisa, Veronica, Karen, Vicky, Cookies – I met her in the ice-cream parlor – Tanya, Diane, Lori and Carla, Marina, Selena, Katrina, Sabrina, about three Kims, Latoya and Tina, Shelley, Bridget, Cavi, Rasheeda, Kelly, Nicole, Angel, Juanita, Stacey, Tracy, Rhona and Rhonda, Donna, Yolanda, Tawana and Wanda.’2 The rhyming of this inventory of names has the same effect of making one woman no different from the others, as does the phrase ‘about three Kims.’ The woman who would come to be known as Lil’ Kim, though, wasn’t having it. Something in the very culture that produced DMX and attitudes like that expressed in the song knew that even this was provocation, a challenge – whether ’X meant it as such or not, a provocation to the potentially nameless women to truly claim their name, claim their own destinies.
Black culture has always admitted and accepted that reality is more of a grand, embodied riddle than some corny project of ‘progress.’ We have always felt that little animating something inside us, that soul that is apart from the body, and yet a part of the body. This mystery of soul keeps reminding us that life is an unravelling of the profound mysteries of ourselves. And if such an inner existence weren’t profound enough, we see the same thing outside of us: we are to be both a part of our world and apart from it. This reality could not not be a riddle, a game or joke of some sort. At times it’s dark comedy, at times ‘a lowdown dirty shame,’ as Albert Murray would call it. At other times it feels so damn good! The point is, it is complex in the way a riddle is complex – complex in a playful way, and we have to be able to laugh at ourselves, to be slightly embarrassed by how wrong we were when we become exactly what we passionately hate. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a group that has been so oppressed by those outside their own group could also be oppressors of those within their group. But we can still dig it – that this too is part of the game. And the game and lesson of life, however, rest in continuing to participate in it actively, because anything goes. In fact, everything goes. Everything is and must be made useful to us, as everything is part of the game. Take a look at the ‘yo mama’ jokes we give, the freestyle battles we wage in a cipher or pretty much any aspect of the culture. As in art, for Black people, so in life, and vice versa: one cannot be simply a lame old critic who stands by and analyses the game. We analyse by participating, we change what we don’t like by doing it with one’s own unique style. As Biggie raps on ‘Juicy,’ ‘Damn right I like the life I live, ’cause I went from negative to positive.’3 Imagine how ridiculous it would be to stop your life in order to critique it, or to hate on someone else’s. In hip hop the mantra is ‘can’t stop, won’t stop.’ Just as hip hop says it, Zora Neale Hurston says it too, using a metaphor of dance, in her essay ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’:
‘Negro dancing is dynamic suggestion. No matter how violent it may appear to the beholder, every posture gives the impression that the dancer will do much more. For example, the performer flexes one knee sharply, assumes a ferocious face mask, thrusts the upper part of the body forward with clenched fists, elbows taut as in hard running or grasping a thrusting blade. That is all. But the spectator himself adds the picture of ferocious assault, hears the drums, and finds himself keeping time with the music and tensing himself for the struggle. It is compelling insinuation. That is the very reason the spectator is held so rapt. He is participating in the performance himself – carrying out the suggestions of the performer.’4
Life is in fact a dance that is both a ‘confrontation’ and a ‘partnership’; it is ‘antagonistic co-operation’ for us. In the process, we are given the opportunity to show what we are made of, not just to the onlooker but more importantly to ourselves. Each experience is a chance to know more and more about what we are made of, to go deeper and deeper all the way down to the bottomless black bottom of ourselves. So if DMX’s lyrics seemed to turn women into an inventory, Lil’ Kim’s clap-back would be not only to assert herself, but something from deep down within herself that would be bigger and deeper than any inventory of names or bodies or people. In a 1996 interview with Tavis Smiley on BET, she says:
‘When I was younger, I’ve had a lot of relationships where men use to tell me, I wasn’t all that, and I was ugly and how without them I wouldn’t be nothing. Well now that I’m older I’m taking all that and I’m flipping it and I’m like, look, I am somebody and I don’t need you to do this, I’m doing it myself.’5
Not only was Kim dealing with these attitudes of men around her, but also the harsh economic and violent social circumstances of living in ‘Bed-Stuy,’ Brooklyn in the 1980s and 90s. The conditions of the ghetto seemed to say to you that you were ‘nothing,’ a non-entity, that your life did not matter. All of these encounters threw Kimberly Denise Jones into the world of sex. The encounter produces something harshly erotic. The soul – being apart from the body – is disturbed by the perceived ugliness of the body, which is its host. The soul – as part of the body – is disturbed by the ugliness of the environment in which it must live. For young Kimberly, it was as if she were the victim of a one-way highway of cruelty, originating in her environment and the echo of this violence within her own body. But it is precisely through this that ‘Lil’ Kim’ would ‘big up herself’ as we would say, and become the Lil’ Kim who turns out to be quite different from the small-bodied, high-pitch-voiced Kimberly Jones. Lil’ Kim was something else!
HARSH GRAMMAR
Interviewer: ‘How much more raw or more hard is your music going to become, you think, down the road?’
Lil’ Kim: ‘My music may change but I will also cater to what I’ve always been doing, which is, you know, the sexuality, you know a little bit of harsh grammar …’6
If Kimberly was led by the lowdown dirty shame of the ’hood, and the self-hate that came with it, into sexual relationships in which men made her feel undervalued in order to dominate her, then Lil’ Kim was a kind of beast from within her own being who would be powerful enough to reinstate balance in these relationships by showing Kimberly Jones the depths of herself. By showing these depths of self, it would become clear to her that none of these men knew her. None of them had a clue what they were talking about and, at the time, neither did she. Lil’ Kim emerged with a kind of personal power and self-possession that would match the level of aggression, violence and dispossession of her context and the experiences that she had to face. On the records, you can hear a deep ‘female’ voice, ad libbing like rappers do: ‘uh,’ ‘yeah,’ ‘uh huh.’ The voice sounds hungry and rough and sexual and powerful. Somewhere between a growl and a moan.
Lil’ Kim emerges first of all from the chaos of her environment: the misogyny, the materialism, the drugs and guns and violence, and she uses all of these for her own purposes. On the first record where she makes her début, ‘Player’s Anthem,’ she is on the track with a bunch of Brooklyn men: Lil’ Cease and Junior M.A.F.I.A, the Notorious BIG. But even in this environment she comes through as someone who knows herself to be more than equal to the situation at hand. She has moved from what Audre Lorde would call a ‘pornographic’ relation, where she was the object of men’s disdain and desire, to a truly erotic relationship where she is equal to all she encounters and has the ability to participate in a dynamic exchange of equals, rather than the one-way and sterile grammar of men objectifying women. This now equal and dynamic participation between Lil’ Kim and her environment is the beginning of what she refers to as ‘harsh grammar.’ By ‘harsh grammar’ she is not just talking about the explicit content of her lyrics, but to an even greater understanding in which society’s norms and the rigid idea of ‘proper behaviour’ limit people significantly. In such a society, an energy like Kim’s was bound to horrify, offend and disturb. Why? Because those who it horrified, offended and disturbed are those who feared going beyond society’s limits to face their own selves. Lil’ Kim desperately wanted to express herself in order to not be consumed by other people’s ideas of her reflected in the ghetto where she lived, or the words of the men she had sex with. In Saint Lucia, we say, ‘If we don’t shine we will die’. And this is what it means: to live without expressing oneself, even if one is ‘safe,’ is equivalent to ‘dying’ in one way or another. Lil’ Kim was not about to let herself be killed bodily, nor in terms of soul. She wanted to remain who she was: the opposite of the tame, non-threatening Disney woman which society viewed as its ideal and thrust upon all women within it. She proclaims early on:
‘I’m not a Disney broad, a Disney female.’7
This is why Lil’ Kim’s lyrics and songs always act out a female takeover of the sexual domain and the streets. This takeover, when put into words, would inevitably sound vulgar to the ears of those dying a slow, soul-deep death within the comfort of the limitations of themselves they had accepted. If men were previously okay with a woman who was either the ‘Disney broad’ or the street-version of the Disney broad (the ‘chicken head’) who could easily fit into an inventory like DMX’s, Lil’ Kim was a woman with a much deeper and more aggressive sexual desire and she had the language to say exactly what she wanted ‘done to her’ and what she wanted to do to the men. She ends up with her own inventory of men, but one more graphic than DMX’s own, her language dripping with actual experience. It is the Queen Bee – as she dubs herself – bringing the real, as she raps on Mobb Deep’s Quiet Storm, proclaiming herself ‘light as a rock’ and hard as the male member (that rhymes with ‘rock’ – take a guess!). Wherever her lyrics find themselves, whether on American radio or even in this piece here, they remind us of the limits that tightly surround our existence – what we are allowed to say, or print, even when all that we say is reflective of our experiences – of our realities. She reminds us that those whose realities are rough and must be expressed in harsh grammar, get to see a world far wider, deeper and more filled with possibility than ours. The Lil’ Kim born of that experience, eventually made her own inventory on the song ‘How Many Licks’:
‘I’ve been a lot of places, seen a lot of faces
Ah hell I even fucked with different races
A white dude, his name was John
He had a ‘Queen Bee Rules’ tattoo on his arm
He asked me if I would be his date for the prom …’8
She then lists and describes Dan from down south who did things to her with his mouth; Tony, an Italian whom she would make keep going from dark till morning; a Puerto Rican papi who used to be a deacon but whose other job was to please her on a weekend; a dude whom she called King Kong who had a ‘hurricane tongue’. The Lil’ Kim, the Queen Bee is in full possession of her sexual powers, and the men around her have to put respect on her name. They ain’t nothing but her worker bees, and their work is to satisfy her enormous desire – something none of them could possibly do on their own. It is like men and the American environment had created a void over women’s actual presence, and Lil’ Kim is the void awakening and sizing up these same men, these same environments, which obviously don’t have what it takes to deal with the void’s bottomless glare. She raps, on the chorus of ‘How Many Licks’ (alluding to the famous Tootsie Roll commercial):
‘So how many licks does it take ’til you get
to the center of the?
(Cause I’ve got to know)
How many licks does it take ’til you get
to the center of the?
(Tell me)
How many licks does it take ’til you get
to the center of the?
(Oh, oh)
How many licks does it take ’til you get
to the center of the?
(Oh, oh, oh oh)’
She reminds us that the unsayable can be said, the impossible can be done, and it should be said and done no matter how anyone defines it or thinks about it. For her, this meant putting into words all the sweat, the exchange of fluids, the flesh, the rawness, the actuality, the nastiness, the limit-worrying realness of the sexual experience. She is master of both her actions and her words. She is – like so many of us are not – the master of her ability to speak her experience, to speak of that which she likes – whether it falls within the limits of that silly little thing called ‘common decency’ or not. She speaks about sex as it is, for her. She is the Adam of her experience. She names it without any shame, as if it were the beginning of the world. And it is the beginning of the world – her world, and in this world she is Man, she is Woman, she is King, Queen and God.
BIG MAMA
To understand the barriers Kim dismantled with her sexual language you could just take a look at one of the many female rappers and artists that are the children of Kim, the heirs to the world she created by expanding the one she was given. On Latto’s song ‘Big Mama,’ Latto not only dubs herself ‘Big Mama’ but sees herself as the Big Mama to her man (in the same way as men proclaim themselves the Big Daddy to their women). She sings the chorus:
‘He love his Big Mama
Big Mama, Big Mama
Big Mama, Big Mama
Get me wet when he call me Big Mama’9
We’ve gone from the Queen Bee who made men into her worker bees in her world to Big Mama, for whom the men have become like infants, dependent on her (sexual) nourishment. The idea of Big Mama is not really about a mother, but a figure of profound abundance that has an infinite supply of the thing that men want the most, that men have a weakness for. Latto makes this the basis of her sexual world, making it the thing that will get the desired sexual response from her (‘Get me wet when he call me Big Mama’). The grammar has effectively changed. No longer is the woman’s body responsive to the existence of a dominating Big Daddy hunched over the fragile, limited woman who ‘needs’ him. In fact, Latto reminds us that it is the mother, the mama that is the original figure of creative abundance, it is the mother that is the ultimate. Even the Big Daddy is born of a mother, and no matter how big he gets, he can be reminded of that fact. The contract she makes with her man or any prospective man via her body and her libido is that he respects the fact that she is the Big Mama, and this world, the world they enter into to have sex, is hers and it is she who brings us (men) into it – never the other way around. This is Lil’ Kim’s influence, and she paid a much higher price to establish this world than those who have come along after. Kim had to both be the world and the one who created it, as she had to bear the very growing pains of the limited world she had been boxed into, one that has become the playground for artists like Latto, Meagan Thee Stallion, Cardi B, Nicky Minaj, Glorilla, Saweetie, SZA, Sexy Redd and so many others. And the evidence of the pain it took to expand this world is there in Lil’ Kim herself as we see her today. We see both the pain of her having to bear the weight of birthing ‘Lil’ Kim’ into a narrow and limited world that showed its insecurity through its cruelties, as well as the power, of which Kim’s ‘children’ and her legacy are testament.
EPILOGUE
What you must understand about the game of life is that it is a constant struggle to be the cause of your world and not the effect, to be the creator of your world and not one of its objects. The Lil’ Kim that escaped the inventory of faceless women had to constantly struggle not to believe in what the apparent external reality told her about herself – that ‘she wasn’t shit.’ Even with success, the provocations, like life, ‘can’t stop’ and ‘won’t stop.’ That is simply part of the game. That is the heart of life’s dynamic quality. When we see Lil’ Kim now, she looks nothing like the one who first came on the scene in the late 1990s. Plastic surgery after plastic surgery saw Kim trying to get the features of both the Disney broad she distanced herself from early on, as well as the modern version of the ‘desirable woman’ who must shape her body into a certain voluptuousness, by any means necessary, to suit the male libido. The tragedy of this we see in the deaths of people like Jacky Oh, among so many others. As in DMX’s song, we again see alpha males moving their chess pieces assertively forwards. Freddy Gibbs raps on Kanye West’s and Ty Dolla $ign’s song ‘Back to Me’:
‘Fucking two twins
I told her skinny was in
So she took out all the ass
Keep it natural,
But that thing still movin’
I had to knock it down’10
Behind these lyrics is that a man can not only demand a woman ‘add to her body’ to please him – by getting a Brazilian butt lift (BBL) for instance – but at his command she must remove it. He is the Big Daddy! He is the man who has sex with a woman and whom she must obey. He is the one who says what she does with her body, her world, her reality. Even Latto, an heir to Lil’ Kim’s world, has admitted to getting a BBL done for that very reason. Paradox, paradox – all still a part of life. Part of the game, the riddle. But say what? Lil’ Kim is still the Queen Bee. Latto is still Big Mama. Cardi B and Meg the Stallion still proclaim the reign and dominion of their WAPs. There will always be moments where it seems that the world has prevailed upon us with its limits. Even when they seem to shame us by undermining the very heroines amongst us who pushed the boundaries, the boundaries can never truly go back to where they were before. It is simply too late. We have already seen that the limits they posed before us were not real. We cannot unsee it. We cannot unhear Lil’ Kim’s lyrics, the harsh grammar, the half-moan, half-growl of her sexuality which is also the sound of our own potential to break barriers. We saw the faceless Bed-Stuy-born Kimberly Jones become the Queen Bee, Lil’ Kim, the Bella M.A.F.I.A, the Notorious K.I.M. She’s already shown us what’s up with the world. She has dropped the science, dropped knowledge on us all. Life can’t stop and won’t stop. But neither can we in whom life is.
Lil’ Kim, our Big Mama, done told us who we are. More importantly, she told us what we are not – we are not what anyone else says we are. And that goes for all of us – man, woman or child. And that’s the word. We got it from our Mama.
Word to the Mother!
- Mobb Deep, ‘Quiet Storm,’ Murda Muzik, New York, NY: Loud Records, 1999.
- DMX feat. Sisqó, ‘What They Really Want,’ …And Then There Was X, New York, NY: Def Jam Records, 1999.
- The Notorious BIG, ‘Juicy,’ Ready to Die, Bad Boy, New York, NY: 1994
- Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression,’ The Sanctified Church, New York, NY: Marlowe, 1998. pp.55–56.
- KlassicThrowbackTV, ‘Lil’ Kim and Luke Interview (1996),’ available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDuRSyU99cU&t=53s (last accessed on 2 September 2024).
- Martina Watkins, ‘Lil Kim on Tavis Smiley Talk Show (BET),’ available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEni4yP7UbM&t=31s (last accessed on 2 September 2024).
- Martina Watkins, ‘Lil Kim on Tavis Smiley Talk Show (BET),’ op. cit.
- Lil’ Kim feat. Sisqo, ‘How Many Licks,’ The Notorious K.I.M., New York, NY: Atlantic Records, 2000.
- Latto, ‘Big Mama,’ Sugar Honey Iced Tea, New York, NY: Stream Cut and RCA Records, 2024.
- ye, Ty Dolla $ign and Freddie Gibbs. ‘Back to Me,’ Vultures, La Palma, CA: YZY SND, 2024.