Tag: Lil’ Kim

Flashback Friday Flop: “Money, Power & Respect”

Post author By Christopher Pierznik
Post date March 25, 2016
No Comments on Flashback Friday Flop: “Money, Power & Respect”

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Welcome back to the latest edition of Flashback Friday Flop, a weekly feature in which I examine a hip-hop album from years ago that was considered a flop, either critically or commercially or both, when it was released and see if it has gotten better – or worse – over time.

**This week: The LOX’s Money, Power & Respect (1998)**

Puff Daddy and Bad Boy dominated the music industry in 1997, releasing three albums that year – The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death, Puffy’s own No Way Out, and Mase’s Harlem World – that combined to sell twenty-one million copies and gave birth to the Shiny Suit Era.

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Tags Bad Boy, DMX, Hip-Hop, Jadakiss, Lil' Kim, Puff Daddy, Rap, Sheek Louch, Styles P., The LOX

Hip-Hop Medium Uncategorized

Nineteen Ninety-Sex: The Year of Rap’s Femme Fatales

Post author By Christopher Pierznik
Post date February 8, 2016
No Comments on Nineteen Ninety-Sex: The Year of Rap’s Femme Fatales

“I used to be scared of the dick/Now I throw lips to the shit, handle it like a real bitch”

Lil’ Kim was 22-years-old on November 12, 1996, when she uttered those lines, the first lyrics on her debut album, Hard Core. Just one week later, 18-year-old Foxy Brown released her own debut, Ill Na Na, and together the two Brooklyn College Academy alumni set the course for female emcees for the next two decades, changing the way women in hip-hop present themselves to the world — and how they are received by it.

From the cover photos to the lyrics to the album titles, almost nothing was left to the imagination, and with their lethal combination of sexy and street, they easily appealed to fans from both genders.

While Kim and Foxy may not have been the first female hip-hop artists to use their looks as their strongest weapon, they were certainly the most visible and, at least up until that point, the most successful.