Though She Be But Little, She is Fierce

A couple of years ago I decided to build a playlist of songs - one for every year of my life. There were no real rules, other than the song had to fit with the age I was, what I was listening to, and where I was at that time. The early songs were mostly things introduced to me by my parents - Prince, Led Zeppelin, Billy Joel - until I was about 10 when I began to discover music for myself, like Buffalo Tom and Alanis Morissette. It’s around this point on the playlist that you’ll find the track for my 11th year - “All About the Benjamins” by Puff Daddy & the Family.

The first album I ever bought with my own money was No Way Out. I was 11, and frankly I have no idea how I came out of a Sam Goody at the Smithaven Mall on Long Island with a CD that had a Parental Advisory sticker on it. At the time, my interest in the album came from the song “I’ll Be Missing You” that sampled “Every Breath You Take” by Sting. Thinking back on it, maybe I thought that I was buying the CD single (which was still popular at the time) but somehow ended up with the entire album instead. I remember taking it home, putting it into my Walkman CD player and listening through the whole thing and, immediately upon completion, having to go back to one specific track over and over again.

There is something about the “I Did It For Love” sample, the bass line, the rhythm that the lyrics come at you and what they’re saying - the song is just nasty. It’s mean, it has an attitude I wasn’t familiar with, and it represented a direction my music taste would tend toward as I got older. Whether it was hip hop or rock or even pop and dance, I have since loved anything that has a swagger to it that sounds like the entrance music for the baddest wrestler of all time. But really, none of those things got their claws in me as hard as the fourth verse - the one from Lil’ Kim.

I am from a generation of women that had a lot of what might be called “feminist” heroes - mostly white girls with guitars who pushed the envelope for what people thought was a “rock star”. Women like Kathleen Hanna and Shirley Manson and even the Spice Girls weren’t going to let a man tell them what to do or how to be, and wanted girls and women to feel empowered. But none of it made me feel like the forty-five seconds of Lil’ Kim’s verse in this song. She wasn’t just strong, she was pissed off - and unlike the other women permeating popular music at the time she wasn’t shrieking or smashing guitars; she was really calm and thoughtful and terrifying. There was a very good chance she was going to hurt someone and then just keep on going.

Lil’ Kim’s verse paints a vivid, tangible picture of a woman who doesn’t walk behind anyone else. She may be small in stature, but she is commanding and she’s not coming alone. The depiction of violence in her lyrics was something that spoke to a greater conflict within myself. I was an angry kid - bullied in school for all the things about myself I had little or no control over - who was regularly scolded at home for interest in things that depicted violence, especially toward women. My mother never understood my affinity for music like this. She harbored a fear that it promoted domestic violence and that a generation of men would think it was okay to knock their female partners or friends around - including me. I don’t know that she was entirely wrong - I mean, kids do mimic the things they see on TV and it’s not like domestic violence has been eradicated - but to suggest it is, at its core, the byproduct of music or film is mostly just naive. As a result, I would keep my love of professional wrestling and angry music of all kinds hidden from my mother until I was an adult. But that also meant that when I felt my anger become the need to be violent, I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do with that rage - and I thought it meant there was something wrong or inherently evil about myself. Errors in judgement were made, and at least one trip to the principal’s office resulted in a brief in-school suspension. If I never hear the term “un-ladylike” ever again, it’ll be too soon.

Getting back to the song, Lil’ Kim is only in the music video for “All About the Benjamins” during her verse, which disappointed me. But when she does appear, she leaves quite an impression. First, you see her manifest behind Puffy, placing her perfectly-manicured hand on his head to pull him back from the mic. She’s wearing a black mesh dress over black lingerie and oversized sunglasses when she grips the microphone. She’s hot and she is livid. While the rest of the video is sorely lacking in female representation (minus some dancing in the crowd), the little time we get with Kim was enough to imprint on me forever. This is what I wanted “woman” to mean to me - strong, aggressive and so hot she’s leaving scorch marks behind her.

As time went on, the impact Lil’ Kim has had on me has never waned. Her solo work explored - in explicit detail - female sexuality in a way no one else was attempting in my formative years. This was not the ripped bodices of a Danielle Steele paperback, or the distorted male-gaze-y-ness of female pop stars of the 90’s and early 2000’s. Lil’ Kim was going to describe all of the raunchy minutia of her sexual exploits until your face burned and you had to look away. She taught a generation of women, regardless of what we looked like or where we came from, that we were allowed to want and enjoy sex, and we should talk about it out loud. It would be disrespectful not to recognize that she walked so that Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion could W.A.P.

In my late 20’s, I did have to come to terms with the anger inside me. I had to learn to harness it, and how to move beyond it before it completely consumed me. But much like the release valve on a steam pipe, it was the lyrics and attitude of Lil’ Kim that thought me how to let my anger out when it was getting too much to bear. I learned not to throw tantrums, but to be terrifying in my calm, letting out my rage in a slow hiss. I may not be the kind of vixen who leaves a trail of bodies in her wake, but I am fiercely protective of those I love and anyone who needs a leg up. I have seen myself go from zero to Hexxus-level scary when someone is abusing their power or trying to manipulate others for their benefit.

One of my favorite lines from “All About the Benjamins” is Kim stating she’s the “only female in my crew”, but that she’s just like one of the guys in terms of how lethal she can be. She’s not a frightened damsel who needs to be surrounded by men for protection. Kim strikes you as the most dangerous person on this track, someone who recognizes that she has everything you want and in that recognition lies the ultimate power: the men around her are actually there to protect you.