Of all the acts announced on this year’s Vivid Sydney lineup, Lil’ Kim jumped off the poster. The New York rapper’s return, 15 years after her last Australian appearance at the Winterbeatz festival, was framed as a celebration of her 1996 debut Hard Core and its 2000 follow-up The Notorious K.I.M.. The tour artwork, lifted straight from the Hard Core cover, preserves her forever in her breakout moment.
In hip-hop’s canon, both albums more than justify the gloss of a nostalgia lap under the polished banners of Vivid and Melbourne’s Rising festival. Shaped under the mentorship of The Notorious B.I.G., Hard Core was swaggering and provocatively explicit, setting a blueprint that The Notorious K.I.M. refined with slicker pop production. While the next 25 years brought peaks and setbacks, that blueprint held, tracing a lineage through Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Doechii. Without Big Momma Thang and How Many Licks?, there might be no WAP.
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