When she releases Hard Core in November of that year, Kim gets the job as album sales hit 78,000 in the first week and go on to double-platinum certification, an unprecedented feat for a female rapper. I was among the younger buyers of the album at the age of eleven. I expressed little more than a giggly appreciation for Kim’s raunchy demands for sex, love, power, and merchandise when I played tracks for friends out of the earshot of parents. We doubled over in laughter at the graphic puns and dirty sketches between tracks, but when I listened to it alone, I felt a visceral shift in my posture and attitude. I was acquainted with Third Wave Riot Grrrl bands performing a brand of sex positivism that functioned mostly as a “Fuck you!” to power disparities in gender and sex, but this was something entirely different. Kim was inverting these same structural powers through her rhymes, not with a “Fuck you!” but a “Fuck me… No seriously, come the fuck over here and fuck me.”
“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.