The rapper Eve, who has just published a memoir, stopped at Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books, in Philadelphia, for a caffeine boost the other day. While she waited for a matcha latte, she nearly bumped into a large in-store display of the book’s cover, which features a sultry picture of her in a low-cut black blouse that reveals her famous paw-print chest tattoos. In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, Eve was a member of the Ruff Ryders, a hip-hop ensemble, led by DMX, whose music videos were full of motorbikes and pit bulls. In her hit with the group “What Ya Want,” she declared herself “the illest, vicious pit bull in a skirt (grrrr).”
At the bookstore, Eve, who is now forty-six, scanned more corgi than pit bull, wearing a Madewell denim jumpsuit. She was bubbly and spoke with Philly vowels and occasionally slipped into a posh English accent. (She grew up in Philadelphia and now lives in West London with her husband, the British race-car driver Maximillion Cooper.) She still has some bark in her, though. On how she settled on that morning’s ensemble: “I got tired of putting together all these outfits for the book tour. I can’t think about a fucking shirt and a different thing. So I was, like, ‘Jumpsuit, bitch!’ ” The night before, she had done a book talk with the owner of Uncle Bobbie’s, the writer and professor Marc Lamont Hill, at the nearby Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church. “It was a huge church!” Eve exclaimed. “Seven hundred people came. I was trying not to curse a lot, because I curse a lot.”
A few days earlier, she had done an interview for the hip-hop radio show “The Breakfast Club” in which she was asked about a phone call with Jay-Z in 1999, on the day that her début album went on sale. According to Eve, Jay-Z congratulated and then consoled her. “Don’t be too upset, because female hip-hop albums don’t do that well,” she recalled him saying. Following the radio appearance, she started getting irate text messages. “I guess some blog tried to make it, like, ‘Jay tried to discourage Eve.’ It was so not like that,” she explained. She thought it was a fair prediction: “For me, it just gave me that extra bit of ‘Oh, I’m gonna show you.’ And not ‘you’ meaning Jay. ‘You’ meaning the industry. It’s a Philly thing. We like to be the underdogs.” The album, “Let There Be Eve . . . Ruff Ryders’ First Lady,” hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, making Eve the third female rapper to take the top spot, after Lauryn Hill and Foxy Brown.
She said that she was used to being counted out, and sometimes left out. Early in her career, she attended the popular jam sessions held in the Philly living room of Ahmir Khalib Thompson—Questlove, of the Roots. She recorded a verse on the group’s Grammy-winning song “You Got Me.” Her name didn’t appear in the credits. “I was just the girl Eve that hung out in the studio,” she said. (Questlove later expressed regret at the oversight, and wrote, “My bad, this was pre-computer days,” in the liner notes of a Roots compilation in which Eve got her due.) Even after she found success, she tended to get written off as just a pretty face: “I would walk into the studio by myself, and the producers would ask me, ‘Do you want to wait for your writer?’ People were surprised I wrote my own rhymes.”
She went on, “I’m so happy that, when you look out now, there are more female voices. Because, for a time, there was nothing, or there was, like, the one or two.” After a period in which Nicki Minaj reigned supreme, but atop a lonely throne, Cardi B, Doja Cat, Megan Thee Stallion, Ice Spice, Flo Milli, Lizzo, and others have shared the airwaves. “Back when I was out, there was a lot of moaning about ‘Oh, women are so expensive,’ ” she said. “Like, the budgets for hair and makeup will be too big. Now, with the Internet, female rappers come with an audience.”
Eve has advised young female rappers on how to deal with labels and launch a brand. In her book, which she co-wrote with the music journalist Kathy Iandoli, she recounts asking Sean (Diddy) Combs out for lunch to pick his brain about starting a clothing line. “I think he thought it was an air-quotes ‘business meeting,’ ” she elaborated at Uncle Bobbie’s. On the sex-trafficking charges brought against Diddy, she said, “I think that it is a time of illumination, reckoning, truth, karma. A friend texted—we’re so woo—that we’re in a time where the moon says all truths will be revealed. I believe that. This shit cannot continue.”
Eve’s musical tastes have shifted since moving to London. “I’ve started listening to a lot of Afrobeat and Amapiano,” she said. She didn’t snag tickets to one of the Taylor Swift concerts at Wembley Stadium, even though Swift is her compatriot. (Swift, who hails from Berks County, recently called Philadelphia her home town.) “I love her songs, but you have to be a Swiftie to be in that environment,” she said. “I’m a fan of her as a woman.” She continued, “Someone stole her shit, basically, and she was, like, ‘O.K., I’m gonna show you.’ ” It’s a Philly thing. ♦
