Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, we’re revisiting our cover story with Lil’ Kim from our November 1999 issue. Fresh off the release of Notorious K.I.M., the artist’s chart-topping homage to her late mentor and lover Biggie Smalls, Kim sat down for a conversation with Anita Sarko about her career, her love life, and breaking through in a male-dominated industry. So sit back and take some notes—you just might learn a thing or two.
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“After I came out with Hard Core, I had to ask, ‘What am I doing that everyone likes so much?’ It took me almost three years to realize the answer: I was just being myself. Now there are so many women out there who are doing what I did. But I’m Lil Kim. I’m the one who started all this.”
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“Friends of mine said to [Biggie], ‘You know, Kim knows how to rap.’ He was like, ‘Please! She’s too cute to know how to rap.’”
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“After [Biggie] died, honestly, I wanted to remain a baby for a while. His death forced me to become mature too soon. And he was everything to me. My father, sister, brother. He would tell me when to go to sleep, when to wake up. It was crazy. So I wasn’t very confident about this album. I was very depressed, very scared and nervous. Biggie had always been there to tell me what to do.”
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“We lived on the same block in Brooklyn. I always thought he was cute, and when I first started talking to him. I felt like I’d known him for years.”
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“Biggie was a beautiful poet. He was like Langston Hughes. A lot of people always assumed that Biggie wrote for me. Yeah, he helped me out a lot, but I wrote all my music. I wrote everything. He may have written a few verses on my first album, but I’m gonna let you know right now, he was the only one that I would let do that for me. Biggie and I basically had the same mind, the same ear, the same ideas.”
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“I think Puffy [Sean Combs] listens more from the consumers ear, and Biggie listened more from the street’s ear and from his own ear. Whatever Puffy puts out, he wants it to be the top-notch best.”
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“I have to admit, when I first came out, guys were loving me. Then all of a sudden it did a total 360. In my first three months on tour, my shows were packed with men. In the next seven or eight months, the whole front row was women. Now it’s a mixture, with a lot of my fans coming from the gay community.”
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“You know, I’m a very spiritual person, and I believe that when God made you, he made you what you are. So when someone comes along and tries to clone you, they can’t do it. God made everyone separately. If you’re a certain kind of star, someone else can’t come and be that same star. It can’t happen.”
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“I’d say, Biggie wants me to do this, Puffy wants me to do that. And she [Mary J. Blige] said, ‘Kim, you are a strong, beautiful, and smart woman. You can make your own decisions.’ Whenever I felt like I couldn’t do it, she would always tell me, ‘Yes, you can. And if there’s anyone you need to learn from, it’s me.’ One thing Mary’s taught me is that I’m not the only one going through all this. As big as she is, she’s going through similar things.”
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“But I would say that the people who made me say I want to be in this business were Queen Latifah, Da Brat, Salt n’ Pepa, and of course Mary J. Blige. They were definitely my inspiration to this game.”
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