Brooklyn, NY · hip-hop

Lil' Kim

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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 was born in 1974 and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the daughter of a former U.S. Marine. Her parents separated when she was nine, and she left home at fourteen, living on the streets through much of her adolescence while freestyling, influenced by MC Lyte and the Lady of Rage.

The Notorious B.I.G. discovered her in 1994 and brought her into his group Junior M.A.F.I.A., whose debut album Conspiracy went gold behind two top-20 singles. She went solo in 1996 with Hard Core, which spawned "No Time," "Not Tonight (Ladies Night)" and "Crush on You" and became the highest-debuting rap album by a woman at the time, selling more than six million copies worldwide. It was during this run that she took on the nickname Queen Bee.

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. A 1999 nail-art collaboration with Bernadette Thompson, later exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, extended that reputation into mainstream fashion. Her influence is widely acknowledged by subsequent generations of women in the genre.

Later albums included The Notorious K.I.M. (2000) and La Bella Mafia (2003), the latter going platinum behind "The Jump Off" and "Magic Stick," which reached number two on the Hot 100. She topped the chart herself as a featured vocalist on "Lady Marmalade" in 2001, winning a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals.

In 2005 she served a one-year prison sentence for lying to a jury about her friends' involvement in a shooting, releasing The Naked Truth during her incarceration and later chronicling the case in the reality series Lil' Kim: Countdown to Lockdown. She continued recording through mixtapes and guest spots, releasing her fifth album, 9, in 2019.

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