Back in 1997, Eve’s promising career was almost derailed by a snarky, pill-popping, bleach-blond white boy from Detroit. She’d started messing around with music as a teen, but only began pursuing it in good faith after a chance encounter with Mase at the Bronx strip club where she briefly sojourned. “That night, he drove me around and we rapped all night until the sun came up,” she recalled recently. “And I never went back in the club.” After another fortuitous meeting, this one with an executive at Dr. Dre’s Aftermath records, Eve delivered an audition, flew to Los Angeles, and was signed pretty much on the spot. Eight months into the collaboration, Dre met Eminem, and Eve was sent packing to Philly.
But as with all the best origin stories, that failure gave Eve Jihan Jeffers resolve. An opportunity presented itself in the form of Ruff Ryders, a New York crew which, in the late ’90s, had made the transition from management company to label. Eve stood out with her platinum-blonde baldie and a pair of selectively-deployed paw prints on her chest. Her rap skills would soon become just as striking. “They made me write and recite, write and recite,” she said. “It was like boot camp. You had to prove yourself to them, and that’s what made me a better MC.”
In 1998, the same year Ruff Ryders’ principal rapper DMX released two platinum-selling albums, Eve got to work. By that point, the only credit to her name was a loosie on the Bulworth soundtrack, released as Eve of Destruction. But in 1999, she appeared (although uncredited) alongside Erykah Badu on the Roots’ breakout “You Got Me” and joined Blackstreet, Janet Jackson, and Ja Rule on the pastel “Girlfriend/Boyfriend.” She employed a different style on all of them: sly, seductive incense-rap here, no-nonsense wit there. Eve’s first proper release, the vaguely salsa-inspired “What Ya Want,” featuring Nokio of Dru Hill, was built around a rudimentary Latin preset on an E-MU synth, but it soon cracked the Top 40.
That fall, amid Y2K mania and vague collective fears about an uncertain future, Eve officially claimed her spot as Ruff Ryders’ self-described “pitbull in a skirt” and released Let There Be Eve…Ruff Ryders’ First Lady. It became the third rap album by a woman to crest the Billboard 200. She was 21, one of a handful of women who served in the token but compulsory role as the “first lady” of any given ascendant rap crew. Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Mia X, and Rah Digga, among others who had achieved name recognition within the genre, all had their own styles. And of course there was Lauryn Hill, who had managed to escape the tyranny of Wyclef and the Fugees to release an album that set records still standing today.
Like Eve, many of these women were more charismatic and skilled than their male counterparts, but often had less creative control of their own projects. You can hear that tension all over Let There Be Eve; across its 14 songs and four skits, the domineering energy of Ruff Ryders is palpable and weaselly. Eve isn’t even the first voice you hear on her own debut album, or the second, or third. The intro track, “First Lady,” is the equivalent of a red carpet being unfurled, a call-and-response chant delivered by Swizz Beatz and an anonymous male chorus: “When I say E-VAY, y’all say E/When I say RU-UFF, y’all say RYDERS.” The next track, the steel-tipped “Let’s Talk About,” opens with ad-libs from Ruff Ryders’ associate Drag-On. When Eve finally appears, a couple seconds in, it feels like the relief of a sunbeam.
Still, it’s very much a family affair throughout. Even when it feels like her ideas are retrofitted to preexisting, Swizz-produced morsels—on the frosty posse cut “Scenario 2000,” featuring DMX, Drag-On, and the Lox, for example, Swizz samples himself—Eve establishes breathing room for herself. One track, the chest-thumping skit “My Bitches,” is a direct response to DMX’s “My Niggas,” but is awesomely appropriated to act like something of a thesis statement for the entire project: “My bitches, my bitches that take care of they kids/My bitches, my bitches that you don’t respect/My bitches, my bitches that you always neglect/Y’all niggas ain’t real, y’all niggas ain’t shit.” Eve’s lyrics often appear simple in transcription, but they land with the heart and urgency Philly rap is celebrated for.
Despite the Ruff Ryders’ attempts at co-opting Let There Be Eve, it winds up being an album of self-determination, where she effortlessly bests the guys at what they think is their own game. There is little experimentation on the album—that would come later, with her blockbuster Scorpion album—but Eve bobs and weaves with dexterity, skillfully overcoming Swizz Beatz’s anemic production. At the time, collaborators and critics often attributed Eve’s success to her ability to hang with the guys without sacrificing her conventional femininity; the critic Touré, in a Rolling Stone review of the album, described her as “a thug with curves.” Her maneuvering required a kind of gender code-switching in which she had to be the “pitbull in a skirt,” years before the concept of the Cool Girl would become solidified in pop culture. It was an oppressive and offensive framework, mirrored across genres of all kinds, and Eve challenged it in part by using hardcore, “masculine” rap to sculpt her own power.
She defined herself boldly, a feminist former stripper who loved her all-male crew but reserved a unique allegiance for her girlfriends. The album’s primary singles were expressions of loyalty to both. The plucky, buoyant “Gotta Man,” is a ride-or-die anthem, featuring bail money happily paid and secrets kept. As a teen, I cried often to “Love Is Blind,” the semi-biographical single in which Eve recounts her best friend’s abuse at the hands of a partner, and dreams up a revenge fantasy: “I don’t even know you and I’d kill you myself/You played with her like a doll and put her back on the shelf/Wouldn’t let her go to school and better herself/She had a baby by your ass and you ain’t giving no help.” Elsewhere in 1999, Destiny’s Child and TLC were demanding accountability from men, across songs like “Bills, Bills, Bills” and “No Scrubs,” which unfairly lumped them together as man-hating feminists. Eve joined the chorus, but grounded that ethos in concrete, high-stakes realities—good riddance to men who ran up your phone bill, sure, but also men who didn’t take care of their children, who abused their partners, who made life materially harder for the women around them. The message stuck.
In 2000, Eve appeared on an episode of “The Queen Latifah Show” alongside the friend in question on “Love Is Blind,” offering personal experience as PSA. The song, whose hook features an uncharacteristically somber Faith Evans, was very far from my personal experience, but as a young woman approaching adolescence, it felt like it was within the realm of some shitty hypothetical future. In the ’90s, women like Salt-N-Pepa and Lil’ Kim forced hip-hop into something resembling hospitality to sex-positive feminism. Eve took it a step further, rapping about sex (“You make me cum, I might flood the block/Wet up ya socks”) in between complex narratives that got as gritty as life is. She was a welcome counterbalance to the glossy fantasies at the top of the charts, like watching a hard-hitting documentary after time spent bingeing Disney fairytales.
But after the album’s release, Eve fell into what she describes as a depression. She found herself submerged by the sudden, swift change in her professional life, and how it warped her every day. “I was 21,” she told Ebony in 2001, “and there was nobody who I felt like I could really talk to, who really understood what I was going through. I was going through a growth process, definitely changing from a young woman to a woman.”
She emerged from it by plucking some creative control from Ruff Ryders and making Scorpion, a more pop-minded album that featured “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” the inaugural winner of the Grammys Best Rap/Sung Collaboration category; she had traded in Drag-On and Swizz Beatz for Gwen Stefani and Dr. Dre. In doing that, she expanded the territory claimed by women rappers. Her peers, like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, were finding desirability as It Girls in fashion, but Eve had her ambitions set higher than appearing in advertisements for luxury brands. “Some of y’all ain’t writing well, too concerned with fashion,” she rapped, a little smugly. And yet she soon launched her own clothing line, the beloved but short-lived Fetish by Eve. All the while, she had prophesied an early retirement for herself, telling a reporter she didn’t think she’d keep making music after 25. She wanted to act or direct or get into philanthropy. In the 18 years since Scorpion, appeared in a handful of big-budget studio films but released just two albums. She kept her promise.
