I & I: Speakeasy: Lil’Kim- Hard Core (Feelings) Wayward Album Listening Session
In the spirit of I&I Speakeasy, Metro54 kicks off Wayward Albums; a new series of collective album listening sessions. Each listening session opens up space for critical reflection and collective listening and conversation guided by special guests or Metro54 team members. Together we listen, dance, make sonic annotations and hold space for all the contradictions, politics and joy an album brings.
We begin with Hard Core (1996) by Lil’ Kim. A record that forged a new world of feminine erotic power and agency within hip hop. A fricative relationship that mirrors the structures of racial, gendered capitalism and patriarchal dominance in the world outside the music.
Hard Core is not just an album. Almost thirty years later and it’s still hard core in desire, pleasure and imagination. Teenage Lil’ Kim flipped the script in a world where she reclaims her erotic power and holds it with sharpness, glitter, pain and force. It is a rejection of misogynoir not of ‘men’. It is a demand for power not permission.
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This evening is dedicated to the raunchy, dirty, bombastic, rugged and rough music made by radical women and femme (sound) artists, composers, rappers, musicians and sonic trouble-makers. Join us as we listen closely and collectively to the frequencies, contradictions and cultural weight of this radical body of work.
Date: 23 May, 2025
Time: 6pm - 10pm
Location: Westerdoksdijk 597
Entrance: Free (ticket link)
Photo: Lil Kim for Rap Pages Magazine (1996).