Eve Recalls Stripping as a 17-Year-Old, Says She Quit Because She Was ‘Lazy’
As a teen, Eve relocated from Philadelphia to the Bronx in search of music stardom. But when fame didn’t come as instantaneously as she hoped, Eve was on the grind at jobs that were unappealing to her.
Ahead of the September 17 release of her memoir, Who’s That Girl?, the artist shared an excerpt from the book with People, recounting her time working at a retail shop and strip club at 17 years old.
“In my head, I was thinking, ‘I need to be grown now, and it’s the quickest way I can get out of the house,'” Eve wrote. “But I was so bad at it. I was lazy.”
After two months of working at the strip club, Eve met Mase, who encouraged her to rap instead.
“When MA$E became a pastor, I was like, ‘Yeah, that makes sense,'” she continued. “He was my prophet that day. I needed that extra push.”
By the late 1990s, Eve would be signed to Aftermath Entertainment by founder, rapper and superproducer Dr. Dre, but within eight months, she was dropped.
“I think it was a huge blessing in disguise,” she said. “I needed to be humbled. I think a lot of the reason why I got dropped by Dre is that I was so, ‘When is it my turn? When are you going to put me on?’ So extra Philly feisty. I needed to be sent back home to be like, ‘OK, well, if you got this opportunity again, who do you want to be? What do you want to show the world?'”
Eve’s second chance would come when she joined New York-based collective Ruff Ryders, which included the late DMX, the LOX, Swizz Beatz, Drag-On and more at its height.
“I was like, ‘OK, this is a ride or die situation. I’m rapping for my life right now,’” she says. “I had to kill them all, lyrically.”
Eve’s fight to break through the music industry paid off, and while she hasn’t released an album since 2013, her first three albums, Let There Be Eve, Scorpion and Eve-Olution made the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100.
Eve previously spoke about rapping for strip club guests on Extra in 2020.
“The club I was in had a lot of people from the music industry that used to come there and once i found that out, I was like, ‘This is gonna be my hustle,'” she told the outlet. “So i would say to guys like, listen, ‘I will give you a lap dance for free. If you think that I’m wack, let me rap for you.’ And nine times out of ten they still gave me a tip because they were like, ‘Damn, yeah, you dope.'”
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