Queen Latifah gives hip-hop “a whole lot of credit” for where her legacy stands. Looking back on her emergence in the 1980s — when she introduced her vibrant Afrocentric style and women empowerment anthems to the world — the rap icon tells POPSUGAR she’s grateful the then-budding culture embraced her authenticity. It was “a really cool time in hip-hop,” Latifah says, when she and her peers “were able to make music about anything we wanted” and when “being unique and different was actually celebrated.”
“We went for it as much as so-called hippies did in the ’60s,” Latifah recalls of her peer group’s trailblazing efforts in hip-hop. “By doing that, it gave us the courageousness to try things, get out there, try to sell it, and go for it.” And go for it she did.
“I’m just happy that I had that kind of mom who loved hip-hop.”
Latifah, a proud New Jersey native born Dana Elaine Owens, is a worldwide phenomenon today. The courageousness she speaks of from the early days of her rap career has extended to every facet of her decades-long impact on pop culture — from representing a generation of strong Black leads in her classic ’90s sitcom, “Living Single,” and dozens of blockbuster films (one of which scored her a 2003 Oscar nomination) to being a changemaker across entertainment, beauty, and more. Latifah has done it all and then some. But even with a celebrated career some folks can only dream of, she warns that it wasn’t always without hardships, especially when she was an up-and-coming hip-hop artist.
“We had to go through a lot of challenges,” she remembers of her beginnings in music, which included figuring out “which shows” and “which promoters were good ones.” But the music legend says she and her fellow emcees had some “great mentors showing us what to do as kids out there,” too — KRS-One, Public Enemy, and Heavy D to name a few. These were open-minded people, she says, “who didn’t look at us like, ‘OK, what are these kids doing? This is not going to…
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