Rapper Eve: Being one of the few women in hip-hop added ‘fuel to the fire’ to succeed

Rapper Eve made her name as one of the few women in hip-hop in the Nineties and Noughties, which meant she was forced to embrace “the underdog position”.

She joined the previously all-male Ruff Ryders crew in the late Nineties, which included artists like DMX, and released her debut album, Let There Be Eve… Ruff Ryders’ First Lady, in 1999. Later she became known for more pop-friendly hits, such as Who’s That Girl, and a feature on Gwen Stefani’s Grammy-nominated single Rich Girl.

The Philadelphia-born rapper opens her autobiography with an anecdote about releasing her debut album – and getting a call from none other than Jay-Z.

“He did open the call with ‘Congratulations’, but then he chased it with something like… but don’t be too upset, because female hip-hop albums don’t really do that well,” Eve, 45, writes.

Reflecting back on that moment now, she says: “I started liking the underdog position, where I was like, OK, I’ll show you. It became a theme for me. It did seem to be like: these people are really doubting me again, what the f***? But having said that, I guess it was the fuel to the fire I needed to be able to do a lot of the things that I’ve done.”

She almost immediately put Jay-Z in his place, as her album went to number one on the Billboard 200 – making her the third female rapper to do so – as well as going double platinum.

Eve admits to feeling conflicted about being one of the few women in hip-hop at the time, though. “I had moments where I loved it – I was this well-protected girl with Ruff Ryders,” she says.

“If we walked into the club or we walked into the room, people parted ways. Great, yes – but internally, that was super hard.”

She suddenly found herself in a completely new environment – and the entertainment industry felt far removed from her beginnings on what was nicknamed ‘Murder Street’ in Philadelphia, and she recounts feeling isolated and lonely.

“I started drinking and smoking weed more than I should have, and experimenting with things. Sadly, that just makes you even lonelier, to be honest. There was so much I had to navigate on my own.

“There were times where I thankfully did have some people to speak to, but back then, nobody talked about anxiety, depression, alcohol, nobody was saying ‘addiction’, nobody was having that kind of conversation. It was like, ‘Oh, everybody drinks, everybody smokes – if you’re sad or tired, you’ll be alright’. It definitely took its toll.”

All this pressure was exacerbated by being in the public eye.

“I had my first panic attack in my young 20s and still didn’t understand what it was. [For me] to start thinking about real wellness – I did start therapy, I’m really into acupuncture and bodywork healing, things like that – I started doing lots of different things, but not until my late 30s,” she says.

The turning point was getting a DUI in 2007, when she got behind the wheel to drive home for an afterparty after drinking, and crashing her car into a railing in LA. She was sentenced to 56 days probation, which is when she says it really “hit home” that she needed “to get it together”.

“It was the first time in probably years I remember actually being sober every single day. I was probably sober once or twice a week, which was bad. That gave me the time to sit in my feelings, sit in my emotions – it was 56 days, and the biggest 56 days of my life.”

These days, Eve does have the occasional drink, but says the break from alcohol allowed her to “understand when I was going overboard”.

Writing her memoir, Who’s That Girl, has given her the space to think about these important life moments – but it wasn’t an easy process.

“I didn’t come from a family of communicators, so vulnerability is really hard for me,” she explains.

“It’s funny, because most of the music I’ve written – it’s personal, the things that I’ve talked about. But even with that, I realised that I’d never broken through the other wall of real vulnerability – possibly because it is hip-hop, and a lot of that is [acting like], I’m hard, you’re not going to break me. So I definitely feel naked now.”

The book covers her career – making her way in hip-hop, acting in the Barbershop franchise and co-hosting on American talk show The Talk – but also moments of personal struggle.

These include an ectopic pregnancy in 2006 when she was filming the Eve TV series and pretended her appendix had ruptured, as well as her struggles to get pregnant after marrying her husband, British racecar driver and entrepreneur Maximillion Cooper. She was diagnosed with endometriosis and fibroids, and underwent several rounds of IVF to conceive her son Wilde, who is now two-and-a-half years old.

“It’s important we talk about it as women – we’re not alone in this… When I was younger, I always had these painful periods that I was told, ‘They’re supposed to be painful, that’s what it is’. Nobody was talking about endometriosis or fibroids or anything.

“So I was like, let me put it all out there and maybe, hopefully, it can help in some way.”

Eve moved to London a decade ago, where she now lives with her husband and son – and Wilde’s upbringing couldn’t be further from her own.

“I think about this a lot, how far removed our worlds are. It’s something we all want to do – our parents did the best that they could, and we want to do the best that we can for [our children].

“There’s so much Philly in me, which I love, because I want him to have that. I want him to experience that and feel that, that’s important to me. But I’m also so grateful that there will be things that I know he’ll never see.

“Knock on wood, he’ll never – hopefully – see a gun at eight or nine. I saw so many things. I just want him to be a kid, playing to his heart’s content, not worried and stressed seeing all this adult s*** that you shouldn’t see as a kid.”

Who’s That Girl? A Memoir by Eve with Kathy Iandoli is published by HarperCollins Available now.  

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