It's a niche she's finally made all her own, and one can hardly wonder why. With the claims of Foxy Brown despatched, Kimberley Jones can safely lay claim to the title of hip-hop's most diminutive foul-mouthed sex object. At what cost to her own psyche one can only guess, and yet there are signs here of something beyond the toilet talk and the acreage of bare flesh, as Lil' Kim gets back to doing something she hasn't really tried since Junior M.A.F.I.A.: emceeing.
Following the murder of her friend, on-off lover and creative impetus, Christopher 'The Notorious BIG' Wallace, Kim's career hasn't so much flirted with notions of pornography as gone up to them in a club, stuck its hands where it had no business and thrust its tongue down their throat. Her first solo album, 'Hard Core', left nothing to the imagination save a sense of its creator's dignity. 'Notorious K.I.M.', added little to the stew save a surgically enhanced chest and a ludicrous blonde hairdo.
So, discovering that 'La Bella Mafia' finds the husky-voiced queen of smut actually doing some proper, old-fashioned microphone controlling is a pleasant surprise. And, while the subject matter remains, in the time-honoured manner, resolutely stuck in the gutter so as to better look up all the passing skirts, at least Jones has decided it's time to show she's got some verbal skills. "You in the wrong department, this is the upper class section / And you hos are startin' to irritate me, like a yeast infection" she raps on posse cut 'Tha Beehive'. OK, so it's not Keats, but it would have won her the round if she'd dropped it in a battle.
Beats-wise, 'La Bella Mafia' is easily the strongest thing she's done, and it seems like Kim has raised her rapping game to match the strength of the music. The currently in-vogue Eastern feel runs through 'Shake Ya Bum Bum', a song thankfully recalling the Cheeky Girls in title alone, and '(When Kim Say) Can you Hear Me Now?', a throwdown with Missy Elliott which is all snake-charmer edge and menace. She does speed rap alongside Twista ('Thug Luv'), gets busy over a Swizz Beats guitar loop ('This Is Who I Am') and holds her own against 50 Cent on the standout, the straight-ahead beats and rhymes session 'Magic Stick'. None of which you'd have put money on her doing a few months ago.
So, with this under her minuscule belt, maybe Jones can start thinking about appealing to people for reasons other than rapacious sexuality. Surely a woman who says she's both "Queen of New York" and "about to be elected mayor" can start to aim her lyrics a little higher than the groin.
