Home/Rappers/Female/Lil' Kim

Lil' Kim

Kimberly Jones made explicit sexual writing by a woman commercially viable in rap, took an enormous amount of criticism for it, and watched the approach become standard within a decade.

Early life and Junior M.A.F.I.A.

She grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and was brought into Junior M.A.F.I.A. by the Notorious B.I.G., who mentored her and co-wrote much of her early material. Their personal and professional relationship ran through her entire early career and his death in 1997 shaped everything after it.

Album discography

Hard Core (1996), The Notorious K.I.M. (2000), La Bella Mafia (2003) and The Naked Truth (2005), the last of which was recorded before she served a prison sentence for perjury.

Notable songs

"No Time" with Puff Daddy, "Crush on You", "Big Momma Thang", "Magic Stick" with 50 Cent, and "Lady Marmalade" with Christina Aguilera, Mýa and Pink, which won a Grammy.

What she is known for

Explicit, confrontational sexual writing delivered with total command, and a visual presentation — high fashion, wigs, couture — that treated the rapper as a constructed image rather than a documentary subject. Both of those are now completely normal in rap and were not in 1996.

Influence

Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and most of the current generation work in territory she opened. She has been vocal about the credit question, sometimes acrimoniously, and the underlying point is generally conceded even by people who wish she made it differently.

Hard Core

The 1996 debut arrived with a marketing campaign built entirely around sexual provocation and sold on a scale nobody had projected for a female rap album. Its content was treated as scandalous by the same press that had spent five years covering male rappers writing about the same subject with no comment at all.

Biggie's influence and death

The Notorious B.I.G. mentored her, co-wrote heavily on the early material, and their relationship — professional and personal — structured the first phase of her career. His murder in March 1997 left her without the collaborator who had shaped her writing, and the records after it are audibly different.

Fashion and image

Her work with the stylist Misa Hylton, and later with high fashion houses, established the rapper-as-fashion-figure template. The pastel wigs, the Versace, the 1999 MTV Awards jumpsuit — these are referenced constantly by artists who were not born when they happened.

Legal trouble and later career

She served a prison sentence for perjury in 2005 and 2006 relating to testimony about a shooting involving her entourage, recording The Naked Truth beforehand. She has released sporadically since, toured, and remained a persistent public voice on the question of credit — which, whatever one makes of how she raises it, is a question with a real answer in her favour.