All the Lives I Want

by Alana Massey

  “It was almost as if Josephine Baker and Al Capone had raised their lovechild in the wild and then unleashed her on the rap world,” wrote critic Terry Sawyer of Hard Core’s over-the-top imagery that mixes gangster authenticity with expert feminine seduction.2 Kim drips with diamonds, accessorizes with an Uzi, and commands an army of willing men to pleasure her on demand. “Hip-hop had never seen anything like Brooklynite Kimberly Jones at the time of her solo debut: She single-handedly raised the bar for raunchy lyrics in hip-hop, making male rappers quiver with fear,” read the overview of Hard Core in 2004’s The New Rolling Stone Album Guide.3 Hard Core went beyond setting a new standard in lyrical smut; Kim was declaring war on the political and social structures that dominated her world. And she was going to win. “She says she used to be scared of the ‘dick,’ but ‘now I throw lips to tha shit / Handle it like a real bitch.’ Punning with extreme wit—as if her life depended on it, Lil’ Kim epitomizes ‘uncensored speech.’ She embodies it in an ultra-erotic militancy that is relentless; and, sex-wise, she is all about revolution,” writes Professor Greg Thomas in Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil’ Kim’s Lyricism.4

  But the revolutionary genius of a woman is inherently suspicious to mainstream media, and even more so if that woman is young and black. “Lil’ Kim is presumed by elite definitions to be only an object of knowledge (‘distraction,’ ‘entertainment’), not a transmitter of knowledge herself,” Thomas continues.5 Her detractors sought out ways to dismiss her brilliance as either a counterfeit or an accident. To this day, critics are quick to suggest that Kim would never have had success without the guidance of Christopher Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G., aka Big Poppa, and better known to his friends and fans as “Biggie.” Hard Core is undoubtedly covered in his fingerprints, but he is participating in her revolution. When he sings, “He’s a slut, he’s a ho, he’s a freak / Got a different girl every day of the week” on her breakout hit “Crush on You,” it is a clever inversion of gender expectations wherein a man’s promiscuity is potential cause for his dismissal rather than a vehicle by which to secure his reputation. Though their personal and professional relationship was tenuous at times, Biggie made clear in no uncertain terms that Kim’s genius was her own and championed her project until the end.

  “Lil’ Kim did not make her Hip-Hop entrance as a sexual minority, an exotic, or some disempowered girl in this storied clique of eight men and one woman. She came in lyrically as ‘Lieutenant’ to their mentor… She came in as alter ego and heir to the throne—with a royal, matrilineal Blues resonance all her own,” writes Thomas.6 Biggie himself knew well how uneasily the head that wears the crown lies, remarking often on the corrupting influence of fame and money and the jealousy attracted by both. The success of Hard Core elevated Kim from the token girl in the crew to a hip-hop force in her own right, a status that threatened her once-devoted male fans.

  “She represented a very specific male fantasy, she was the ‘cool girl’ for thugs. She was a rider and down for everything sexually, and you put up with her asserting herself because you knew at the end of it she was stashing guns for you. But once that was no longer her role, rap guys discarded her,” Mychal Denzel Smith told me. As she cultivated a persona and evolved her hip-hop style without help from Puffy or Biggie, rap fans and members of the hip-hop press who had once fawned over Kim abandoned her and sought to replace her. And they saw no better replacement than her own longtime friend and colleague, Foxy Brown.

  The origin of the now legendary feud between Kim and Foxy is most often traced back to the week after Hard Core was released, when Foxy’s own debut, Ill Na Na, came out. Though they’d appeared on magazine covers together earlier that year, competing on the charts was assumed to take their feud to the next level. It is taken at face value that of course two beautiful and talented women releasing albums within a week of each other in the same genre would throw out years of friendship and solidarity in a trifling competition for the top spot. But the tension between Foxy and Kim was a matter primarily of rumors in that first year, rumors largely fueled by members of their rival entourages, Kim’s Junior M.A.F.I.A. and Foxy’s The Firm, rather than by the two women. “It didn’t have to do with Kim and I personally. It was the people around us,” Foxy told Vibe in 1998.7 On her second album, 1999’s Chyna Doll, Foxy all but dedicated her track “My Life” to Kim: “You was my sister, we used to dream together / How we could make it real big, do our thing together.”8 But the dispute was never healed and escalated into a shoot-out between their entourages at radio station Hot 97 in 2001, for which Kim eventually served time in prison after lying to a federal grand jury about the events.

  “Perhaps Foxy Brown and Lil Kim’s sexually liberated hip-hop arrival in the mid-’90s had an unintended side effect, creating a cycle where we boost the most seductive women rappers like a push-up bra and then drop them like DMX on that Slingshot ride once they’re older and (ir)regular-looking and have run out of Blackberry phones to throw at people,” writes John Kennedy at Vibe in 2014, making his case that Kim ought to be respected for the elder statesman of rap that she is, the “Air Jordan of women rappers,” in his terms.9 I agree with Kennedy on all but the point that these consequences are ever unintended. The rift between the two never healed, and though Kim went on to more mainstream success than Foxy, with her 2000 album The Notorious K.I.M. shipping platinum in its first week, the feud followed her every move. Kim’s reputation as a jealous bitch was cemented in both hip-hop and mainstream media ahead of her reputation as a revolutionary emcee.

  In 2009, an emerging rapper named Nicki Minaj began making waves for both her brazenly sexual rhymes and her affinity for over-the-top fashions that appeared to draw direct inspiration from Kim. “I did meet her when I was with Lil Wayne during the I AM Music tour. We chopped it up and I gave her props, but we haven’t spoken since. I got nothing but love for her, I think she is one of the key players in this female rap thing, so you can not do nothing but salute Kim,” Nicki told Necole Bitchie in 2009.10 But by the following year, the two were embroiled in a game of she-said/she-said, sparring on hip-hop radio, media, and on diss tracks. To read the media surrounding their feud, it is easy to imagine two vicious, petty women fighting over gossip and embarrassing themselves. But the actual documents tell a different story; both women are ferociously smart, endlessly patient in their interviews, and still relentlessly goaded into talking more shit than they seem to want to. In transcripts and recordings of Kim’s interviews about their relationship from the first few years of the feud, she acknowledges the feud but is quick to note how excited she was about Nicki when she was on her way up. Similarly, Nicki’s interviews regularly feature her candid admission that Kim is among her most prominent influences. The mainstream media, however, never got the memo about Kim.

  “Nicki Minaj is the world’s biggest female hip-hop star, a top pop star and the first woman to achieve success in both genres,” reads a profile of Nicki by Vanessa Grigoriadis for the New York Times Magazine in 2015. This failure to mention Kim’s trailblazing crossover into pop stardom is just one of many glaring omissions in the piece. “‘Bitch,’ in music, used to be an insult, a sneer, and it still can be. But female empowerment is a trend, and the word has been reclaimed—by Minaj, in many a track; by Rihanna, in ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’; and triumphantly by Madonna, in her recent track ‘Bitch, I’m Madonna,’” she writes, somehow unaware of the track “Queen Bitch” that came out nearly twenty years before. Perhaps more egregious is the assertion that “early in her career, she also adopted Lady Gaga’s method of saturating the media with outrageous costumes,” as if Kim’s iconic pastel wigs and her showstopping MTV Video Music Awards skintight purple jumpsuit and uncovered breast adorned with matching pasty never happened. Nicki is annoyed at the question and dismisses it as “old.”11

  During the interview, Nicki’s agitation reaches a breaking point when Grigoriadis asks a series of questions about the men i
n her life and career who are feuding with one another. It culminates in Grigoriadis asking Nicki if she “thrives on drama.” There is a record scratch of silence, which Nicki breaks by saying, “To put down a woman for something that men do, as if they’re children and I’m responsible, has nothing to do with you asking stupid questions, because you know that’s not just a stupid question. That’s a premeditated thing you just did.” Nicki says, “Do not speak to me like I’m stupid or beneath you in any way,” before asking Grigoriadis to leave.12

  The interaction is an eerie echo of the annoyance Kim showed when being interviewed for the Guardian in 2013. Her interviewer said, “You seem like you’re in a positive place right now—so are your beefing days behind you?” Kim grows exasperated and replies, “That’s a premature judgment to make, because I’ve always been a positive person. People say things about me that they don’t understand. No disrespect to you, but you really have to look at what you said—‘You seem to be in a positive place now.’ You don’t know me. When have you ever seen me be negative?”13 Over and over again, Nicki and Kim are asked to go through the rituals of attending awards shows and going on the radio to discuss their art and are asked to discuss each other. These engagements do not unintentionally fuel these feuds; the fuel is their primary purpose.

  “There can be only one,” the white-dominated mainstream media insist when it comes to female power players, and they double down on this assertion when it comes to black women. The refusal to let these two women, or any two women, coexist as representatives of boldness and brilliance in hip-hop has the more insidious effect of narrowing their cultural influence into hip-hop exclusively. Their inspiration travels much further than that. Christina Aguilera shed much of her pop image in 2002 with Stripped, the tour that saw her in provocative black one-pieces reminiscent of Kim’s and with a hip-hop sound and attitude not unlike Kim’s. Katy Perry spent years sporting well-manicured pastel hair that Kim brought to popularity. The raunchy stage shows of Miley Cyrus are homages to Kim’s envelope-pushing performances, and Cyrus even dressed up as Kim at the 1999 VMAs for Halloween in 2013. And I don’t care how many people believe she was the heir apparent to Madonna, Lady Gaga would never have wanted a ride on a “disco stick” if Kim hadn’t taken one years earlier on “Magic Stick.” Because she is more relevant to today’s music consumers than Kim, it is Nicki who is most able to publicly push back against the failure of white female artists and the media that pander to them to acknowledge the tremendous cultural influence of black women artists like Kim.

  When the MTV Video Music Award nominations were announced in 2015, Nicki took to Twitter to critique the oversaturation of thin white women in pop music, a comment that Taylor Swift took as a personal attack. The ensuing exchange became something of a spectacle, with Taylor eventually apologizing for her reaction to Nicki’s comments. Miley Cyrus responded, “What I read sounded very Nicki Minaj, which, if you know Nicki Minaj is not too kind. It’s not very polite. I think there’s a way you speak to people with openness and love.”14 The one saving grace of the profile that got Nicki so desperately wrong was that it did capture her fearless response to Cyrus. She said, “The fact that you feel upset about me speaking on something that affects black women makes me feel like you have some big balls. You’re in videos with black men, and you’re bringing out black women on your stages, but you don’t want to know how black women feel about something that’s so important?… If you want to enjoy our culture and our lifestyle, bond with us, dance with us, have fun with us, twerk with us, rap with us, then you should also want to know what affects us, what is bothering us, what we feel is unfair to us. You shouldn’t not want to know that.”15 Kim may have actually been the first female rapper to successfully take her music mainstream, but Nicki’s intrepid journey into calling out the hypocrisy of the white establishment is a remarkable crossover of its own.

  What is lost to all of the manufactured squabbling in Kim’s career is the fact that christening herself “Queen Bee” in the 1990s was always about dominating men rather than competing with other women. And though many have attempted to crown Nicki the new Queen Bee, she has resisted the title. Nicki has instead aligned herself with another feminine archetype: the Barbie doll. Kim likened herself to Barbie before Nicki when she rhymed, “Black Barbie dressed in Bulgari / I’m trying to leave in someone’s Ferrari,” in her 2003 song “The Jump Off,” but she has expressed far fewer qualms with Nicki’s self-anointment with that title than she has with any allusions to the Queen Bee. Just as there is a matrilineal transfer of power in the beehive, however, Barbie’s unapologetically pink kingdom is where the imagination and dreams of girls are the rule of law. And both the queen bee role and the legacy of Barbie are that they hold exalted, enviable positions of power and influence. The reality is that in each of their respective realms, they must work tirelessly and often without reward. They endure the oversights and slights to their contributions, perhaps looking forward to the day when they can live out their artistic and personal commitments without being thrown into such pedestrian disputes. These commitments are also crystallized in “The Jump Off” when Kim declares, “Spread love, that’s what a real mob do / Keep it gangsta, look out for her people.”

  Kim and Nicki might never reconcile, and my holding out for them to do so would be more reflective of my hopes than theirs. But there is solace in knowing that the doll armies and beehives they’ve empowered and the music they’ve inspired will be their legacies instead of the tedious feud into which they were thrust. Their creative descendants will know them by the revolution in their art and the strength in their love, the kind of inheritance well suited to represent their audacious empires.

  The Queen of Hearts

  An Alternative Account of the Life and Crimes of Courtney Love

  COURTNEY LOVE WAS DEFILING A corpse the first time I encountered her. Or so I thought in 1994 when, while sitting in the waiting room of my dentist’s office, I opened to the cover story in People magazine about the recent suicide of Kurt Cobain, wherein Courtney is noted as “wearing one of her dead husband’s trademark cardigan sweaters” in the first sentence. In the weeks following Cobain’s suicide, I imagined him committing the act in the now iconic camel cardigan he wore to perform on MTV: Unplugged. I got it in my head that Courtney took this specific garment directly from his body to wrap around herself. The story also mentioned how Courtney had taken a lock of Kurt’s hair and washed it, so it was not entirely far-fetched in my eight-year-old mind that she had collected both of these souvenirs in one ghastly fell swoop. And because I did not know then that both grief and romantic love can manifest as corporeal craving, I recognized no purpose in these rituals outside of the occult.

  The story featured a black-and-white photo of the greenhouse floor where Cobain was found, with part of his right side sticking out in just enough of the frame to plant a nightmare. His now shattered head was mercifully out of the frame, but his foot was in a sneaker that looked like it belonged to a teenager. My mother saw the photo and quickly confiscated the magazine, briefly looking through the pages herself. “That poor baby,” she said before putting the magazine back on the rack. I’m still not sure if she was referring to the infant daughter he left behind or to Cobain himself, but I had no doubt that she wasn’t talking about Courtney. I would go on to become enamored of Courtney the following summer, but for those few months, in my mind, she was a mad widow disturbing the dead.

  I have always bristled at the description of Courtney as “the girl with the most cake.” This spoiled, smug little creature was first introduced in Hole’s “Doll Parts” on the band’s sophomore album Live Through This and has reappeared in nearly every profile of Courtney in the decades since the album’s 1994 release. Love’s signature guttural moan sounds as much like desire as it does pity, and the accompanying image casts her as the impulsive girl child inside a grown woman’s body, a physically and emotionally clumsy brute. We are sad to see her suffer but also know that
such children have a tendency to be insufferable. However, pegging Courtney as the gluttonous girl on the delicious brink of her own self-destruction is a mistake. And more and more, I am dissatisfied with the prospect of Courtney’s legacy being linked to a girl rather than a woman. I am even dissatisfied with the idea that her legacy will be linked to a human at all. Courtney Love, you see, is a witch.

  An eighth grader named Meghan introduced me to Live Through This, along with a handful of other neighborhood converts, during the summer of 1994. This consortium of girls who felt a little harder than we ought to often lay on Meghan’s bed and stared at the pale green plastic stars affixed to her ceiling and listened to the songs on the album out of order. Meghan played the role of DJ, taking requests that our favorite be played next until we had listened to the entire thing. Until I saw the video for “Doll Parts,” I thought that Courtney was the crying beauty queen on the album cover. I imagined her waving to an empty dance hall, winning the contest on the technicality of being its only entrant.

  Loving Hole as an adolescent girl was an exercise in comically misinterpreting lyrics but still identifying with their particularly female anguish. My friends and I listened to the stories on Live Through This as one might listen to a stranger frantically seeking help in a language other than our own. We detected distress but not its source. Hers were stories littered with drugs and shrieking infants and the kind of girls who never stood a chance against ending up in a box by the bed. This was the foreign country of addiction and panicked motherhood and broken hearts. There was an abundance of bodily fluids: talk of milk run dry and girls who piss themselves. It was all germs and embryos. The panicked cries sounded like something that might be waiting to happen to us, or even waiting inside of us already. Those cries broke our hearts—not just for our newly appointed queen but also for our future selves. A world of women’s blood and tears was the one we were on the brink of inheriting and would soon have to live through as well.