The 1990s and early 2000s saw a slew of women stake their claim in the Rap industry, and many leaned on sexually explicit imagery as apart of their push. We listened to artists like Lil Kim and Foxy Brown talk about their bedroom antics, and the former’s photoshoots resulted in pictures that have been emulated by current ladies in the game today. Eve decided not to go that route and she recently shared that her collective, Ruff Ryders, didn’t force her to change her persona in order to conform to an ideal that women needed to take off their clothes to sell records.
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“I loved it. If anything, they were trying to cover me up, like literally,” Eve shared with HipHopDX. “I would come to the studio and I’d have on my little ass crop top with some tight pants and I never wore sneakers, ever. I never wore sneakers. I always wore heels. And so they used to be like, ‘Can you put on a pair of Timbs and a vest.’ What the hell?”
“They never ever tried to say like, ‘Be this person or be that person or this is selling, so you need to try to do this,'” she recalled. “It was always like, ‘Yo, come in here, come in the studio. Write those bars. Write a great record and we’re good.’ That’s it.” Eve wasn’t the only woman in Rap that opted to go in a different direction; Queen Latifah, Lauryn Hill, and Da Brat, are just a few others. Still, there have been debates about women rappers and their sexually explicit content, with one side arguing that it’s a bad influence for children while others point out that men have had similar content for decades.
Take a walk down Ruff Ryders’ memory lane with Eve below.
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