It was exactly the disruption of the cool invulnerable self that rap is so often conflated with and that DMX's early projects explore that made him what he was for me—a space of solace that simultaneously expressed and invoked my deepest feelings of almost overwhelming anger, sadness, and frustration. It is this access to excessive emotion and "the dark stuff" that keeps me writing in/on rap music. Someone else can write about the racial uplift of the socalled conscious rappers and their return to the West-African griot tradition of community building and activism through storytelling. It is important work and even relevant to the work that I do, but it is just not the story I want to tell. You see, it is this excessive, pornographic display of emotion and bodies and vulnerability that, to me, is at the heart of why we, as feminists, must engage the work of rap music. It gives us a space to talk about these things, particularly as Black people, particularly those of us who call ourselves women, particularly those of us who identify with a femme gender—because it is that pornographic excess that we are not meant to hold, not meant to wield, and definitely not meant to speak.

Never shall I forget

the deep sorrows of those inside my house.

Lil Kim’s highly sexualized image and lyrics are seen as manifestations of the sexist, misogynistic ideologies imbedded in rap culture. The glorification of fashion and opulence in her work stand in for the nihilistic reproduction of capitalist fantasy in rap. Lastly, her depictions of criminal lifestyle and activities valorize this hyperviolent behavior and celebrate ‘gang-ster’ culture. As I said these are some representations of Lil Kim and her work. Lil Kim becomes not just a persona in rap music culture but a figure, a placeholder, for multiple contentious debates within and about rap music culture. The purpose of this paper is to argue an alternative reading of Lil Kim’s persona. This is not an apologia for the pornographic nature of some of Lil Kim’s work or an attempt to reframe that nature as an absolute positive. But instead I would like to examine the discourse around Lil Kim and how that discourse is reflective of or at least referential of larger discourses within feminism and scholarship on women around sexual agency and exploitation that I think is most visible in the 1980s pornography debates.

The CROWN Act is a huge achievement for multiple jurisdictions in the United States. However, legal shifts alone cannot do the work of dismantling a systemic culture of anti-Blackness in public and private space. This Article argues that profound cultural shifts must accompany political and legal shifts around an anti-Black history of hair policing. One example of a cultural shift advanced by Black activists, creators, and artists is the creation of natural hair salons, a social space that performsthe work of celebrating Black hair amid a harmful culture of respectability politics and Eurocentrism.

To advance this argument, this Article focuses on the happenstance of the passage of the CROWN Act at the same time as another significant development in the United States: the opening of Miss Rizos Salon in New York City. Miss Rizos Salon made its own name as one of the first natural hair salons in the Dominican Republic, an achievement borne of Black-centered organizing against structural and interpersonal anti-Blackness. Dominican salons in both the Dominican Republic and in the United States have served as common sites of pelo bueno versus pelo malo due to the Dominican salon’s established trait as the place clients go to straighten or relax hair. Today, the reclamation of this space into a reimagined site for the celebration of natural hair creates a promising venue for tackling anti-Black attitudes towards natural hair that cannot easily be addressed by legal regimes. It is this transnational movement of Black organizing that is the direct rebuttal to the command “arréglate ese pajón.” Rather than acquiesce to the command, the Black transnational natural hair movement responds by obliterating the white supremacist projects that created the command.