“Because of the texture, growing up I always wished I had wavy hair. Every little Black girl wanted wavy hair.”
She believes that growing up with a single mother in the Bronx, a “rougher” area, led her to “develop tomboy skills” that stayed with her until she burst onto the music scene in 1992, aged 21.
“When you have a single mother with two little girls living in the hood, you develop tomboy skills. You become the guys you’re hanging with, but I’m still a girl. I’m a little rougher because my environment is rougher. There’s always something you have to fight for. It was never a comfortable situation for little girls, so we had to be little tomboys to get through that time of our lives. By the time I got into the music business, that’s exactly what I was.”
