Brooklyn, NY · hip-hop

Lil' Kim

1 upcoming festival

Queen Bee — the blueprint a very large share of modern women in rap are still working from, hard-won Brooklyn royalty status intact.

Kimberly Jones, known as Lil' Kim, is a rapper from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She emerged in the mid-1990s as a member of Junior M.A.F.I.A., the group assembled around the Notorious B.I.G., and released her debut solo album Hard Core in 1996. Her writing combined explicit sexual candour with the hard-edged delivery of East Coast hip hop, and the persona she built — high fashion, wigs, unapologetic bravado — reshaped what a woman in rap could present. Later albums included The Notorious K.I.M. and La Bella Mafia, and she featured on the multi-artist single "Lady Marmalade". Her influence is widely acknowledged by subsequent generations of women in the genre.

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