All About Eve

Before we start, there are a few things you should know about the rap artist Eve.

She describes herself as a “pit bull in a skirt”. Her former stage name was Eve Of Destruction. She has a pair of dog paws tattooed onto her chest. This is an old tattoo, but a prophetic one. At just 22, she has clawed her way to the top, fighting through pressurised auditions to become the only female member of the ard-as-nine-inch-nails, platinum-disc-carrying crew, Ruff Ryders. As a solo artist, she has sold over two million records worldwide.

Now a confession. Meeting her is a somewhat scary prospect. The pictures on her second solo album, Scorpion, have been perused. The two solo records have been listened to, with particular emphasis paid to the lyrical content. The old interviews have been read and reread. She looks mean. Sometimes, when she doesn’t like somebody, she sounds mean.

At six p.m. in the plush Morrison Hotel in Dublin, she decides that she doesn’t want to do the interview now. There is no room for argument. The venue is changed to the Point Theatre, where, at 8.15, she is due to support Destiny’s Child. The interview, supposedly, will take place before she goes on stage.

Your correspondent is dispatched to the backstage area of the Point, where, alongside an apologetic publicist, the waiting begins. All the other supporting artists and DJs are here. Bellefire are hanging out in the corridor, flicking their hair and trying not to look as though they’re waiting for a glimpse of Destiny’s Child. Trevor Nelson is smiling and schmoozing in his tight, red tee shirt. The Oxide and Neutrino crew are jumping around the place, some drinking, some getting changed and all making stadium-sized amounts of noise.

The waiting continues. By this point, every other Irish interview with Eve has been cancelled. Mobile phones beep, buzz and jingle. At 7.20, the news comes through that the rapper has not left the Morrison yet. Panic spreads across the publicist’s face as the thought occurs that Eve may decide not to make the event on time. Or at all.

An hour and a quarter later, matters have been – at least partially – resolved. Eve has arrived and performed, but cut her set to half its scheduled time. Backstage, in the corridor once more, the interview looks as though it just might happen. Fingers are crossed.

Another ten minutes are spent waiting. Finally, the burly, black security guard nods, opens the dressing-room door into the world of Eve.

Eve Jihan Jeffers might be a ‘pit bull in a skirt’, but she’s also a slip of a girl, much slighter and prettier than the (now manifestly over-made-up and styled) photographs of her would suggest. Big eyes peep out from underneath a long blue-green scarf that covers her closely cropped, dyed-red hair. She seems friendly and slightly vulnerable, a world away from her aggressive, mass-marketed image.

She talks a little first about how nervous she was in front of the Dublin crowd, before nodding vigorously when asked whether she finds it hard to prove herself as a female rapper.

“Yeah, definitely,” she says. “It was much harder before I sold any albums. When I first got into the industry, the guys in the streets would say sly stuff to me, like, ‘you know, girls don’t sell that many records’. But once my first album sold two million, people gave me a certain type of respect because I had proved myself.

“But it is way harder,” she continues. “I had to be in the studio longer than them, I had to write more than them – everything had to be equal or better than theirs. Men can say whatever they want to.” She snaps her fingers. “Some of them can just write anything down or say anything and it’s accepted. From a woman, it’s so critiqued.”

Does she ever feel under pressure to act like one of the guys?

“No, not at all,” she says immediately. “I demand respect. I command it. Whether I’m in a mini-skirt or some jeans, it’s like, ‘I’m here to do my job and you will respect it. If not, then get out of my face’.”

Brave words. Also unsurprising ones. Eve doesn’t admit to weakness easily. The face that she puts forward for the world is the face that she wants the world to see. In the Morrison, the publicist repeated her express wish that a photographer should not be present at the interview. This whole day, Eve has been calling the shots.

But the pressure of having critics, commentators and two million fans who bought your record watch and discuss you across the world should not be underestimated.

A change has been wrought between her first and second solo records. On the first, she was often devastatingly autobiographical. She talked about the father she last saw when she was twelve, the club in the Bronx, New York where she worked as a stripper when she was seventeen. She described how she “thought it was cute to flirt with older cats/Up in they face/Didn’t have a daddy/So I put a daddy in his space”.

On her second record, Scorpion, the rhymes are faster, more polished, but guest vocalists such as Faith Evans, Gwen Stefani, DMX and Teena Marie fill up the spaces where once Eve would have said what she was thinking. While the first single, ‘Who’s that Girl?’, is certainly catchy, it doesn’t get under the skin lyrically. It doesn’t even bruise it.

The new album was written some months after Eve had come back from touring with Ruff Ryders and Cash Money. During that tour, she became depressed. When she talks about it now, she puts a positive spin on her feelings about that time.

“It was real hard,” she says, “but I’m glad I went through it then because it made me learn to do things differently this time around – to stay happy, to stay healthy, to stay with a clear mind. You can be the highest paid person in the world, but if you’re not happy, it means nothing. So, going through that depression then helped me so much now.”

Asked to describe how it actually felt, though, her tone changes. She talks about the depression in the present tense as a living entity that may come back to her, rather than as something she is really over. It’s hard to be assured that she is completely recovered – she mentions more than once that whenever she has free time she sleeps. She used to compose rhymes, but now she sleeps.

“It’s the worst,” she says softly. “You feel so by yourself. You feel lonely – you could talk to people, but it’s like they’ll never understand. You want that person to be you – that person has to be you to understand. You’re always searching. It’s like, ‘am I supposed to be doing this? Or maybe I’m supposed to be doing something else to make myself happy, or… there’s no happiness at all’. It’s the worst.”

Was insecurity part of the problem?

“Maybe it was,” she says. “I lost a couple of my friends just because of jealousy. They’re claiming that I changed, but really they changed.” She pauses for a moment. “But in a way, you have to change, you have to grow up. This is a business and I have to take care of my business. I can’t party all the time. It was crazy.”

Some of those people were childhood friends from west Philadelphia, where Eve was brought up. They were around when she was singing En Vogue covers in a girl group; when she was starting to rap and getting ready to break free from her mother’s strong influence. Some of them would have known her when she was making the two-hour commute to New York, dancing on tabletops in smoky clubs.

No one (including her sparky, bleach-blonde assistant Melissa who is present throughout the interview) has been looking forward to hearing this question raised. But they knew it was coming. Ever since Eve rose to fame and two million people bought her records, every interviewer has wanted to hear her talk about the same thing. Stripping.

“Well, I don’t answer that question anymore in the States,” she says. “But I will answer this way. It helped me realise what I wanted to do with my life. I was seventeen and I did it for, like, a month. It was a growing pain.

“See, the thing is,” she continues, “when you do something like that, you have to be in the state of mind to want to do it. A lot of girls there love doing it. Me? I was like, ‘I can’t do this. First of all, I need more money. Second of all, I don’t want to be taking my clothes off no more’. I just… it really put things in perspective.”

Did it change her attitude to men?

“I know what guys are like,” she says simply. “If you’re in a strip club and they’re drunk, you can’t expect them to be tººhe perfect gentlemen when you’re walking around in a G-string and top. It never really changed my perspective on men.”

What about Ruff Ryders? Was it difficult being the only girl in the group?

“Yes,” she laughs with venom. “They got on my nerves! Getting used to them was hard. And I had to live with these guys. If DMX [Ruff Ryder member] was doing an album, we would all go and stay wherever he was. I had to live in an apartment with four guys. Oh God, it was the worst. I was like, ‘Ugh!’”

So no romantic relationships, then?

“Uh-uh!” she exclaims. “They were like my brothers – my dirty brothers!”

Eve’s audition for Ruff Ryders was not the first time she had tried out as a rapper. When she was eighteen, some friends secured her an impromptu audition for Michael Lynn, president of the Doctor Dre-owned Aftermath label. Although he thought that she was the “weed girl” – the girl who had come to supply him with weed – he decided after hearing her audition to sign her. However, her one year contract finished before an album had been recorded. It was not renewed.

Was it difficult working with Dre having been previously dropped from his label?

“Uh-uh,” she shakes her head. “I actually was happy because I had grown so much as an artist. I was ready to show him. Before, I definitely wasn’t ready. I didn’t know who I wanted to be. I was still growing as a person. If I’d come out then with Dre, I wouldn’t be where I am right now. But getting back with Dre was a great experience. He’s a genius. He brought out something different to any other producer on the album.”

While Eve hails from the East Coast, Dre is a West Coast rapper and producer. Over the years, the enmity and jealousy that have existed between East and West rap musicians have resulted in the murders of two of the genre’s biggest stars: West Coast’s Tupac Shakur and East Coast’s Notorious B.I.G.

Does Eve think the situation has got better recently?

“It’s definitely improved,” she says reflectively. “I think we realise, especially in the music industry, that we lost two very important people, that there’ll never be any other rappers like them ever in the game again. We’re making music and it’s not that serious for people to be losing their lives over. I think everybody has realised that.”

Has she any enemies in the rap fraternity?

“No,” she says evenly. “I don’t make enemies. There’s enough room for everybody. Everybody’s making money and selling records. I’m not mad atcha.”

As Eve shakes hands and says goodbye, she no longer seems intimidating. That she ever did is still not surprising, though. At 22-years-old, she’s coping not just with boyfriend problems and friends crises, but with the ghosts of a difficult past and the pressures of worldwide fame. She needs to be tough.

Right now, she has to ready herself for two more French interviews. When she finishes these, she’ll be driven back to the Morrison. She’ll sleep and, early tomorrow morning, board her next flight.

“I’ve never had anyone to groom me, to say this is how it is,” she says wistfully at one point. “I had to learn patience. I had to learn how to speak in certain ways to certain people. There are days, like today, when I don’t feel like doing shit.”

Ultimately, though, she knows she doesn’t have that option.