Foxy Brown doesn’t do many interviews these days, so this one is a doozy. The Ill Na Na sat with The Combat Jack Show recently and spoke on everything from the good old days with Jay-Z to losing her hearing to her daddy issues, getting teary-eyed on occasion. Check out the most enlightening quotes.
On her history of upgrading dudes
“When you’re 14 and your nickname is good [p—y], what does that say? That means that you have to be, at some point, you have to have that… And then you’re with the strongest dudes. You have to break them down mentally… Nothing makes me like a person more than intelligence.”
On insecurities about her dark skin
“I had the worst insecurity. Because my mom is light-skinned. My mom is very light-skinned, and she’s from Trinidad. She would always tell me to make me feel better, because all the women in my family are light, she would say: ‘I wish I could go to the beach and just get dark.’…And I think we all have that, even in this generation now, with my nieces or my little cousins who are dark-skinned, they have that innate type of… It’s something that I don’t think ever would probably change.”
On what kind of dudes she likes
“I just like powerful dudes, even if he was just the dude on the block, but he just had that respect. That’s why my longest relationship with Spragga [Benz], my first true, true, true love, he’s a militant dude… He just stands for something.”
On her dad’s absence
“My dad leaving just left a huge hole in my heart… Later on, after they divorced, he started getting high and he was really bad. My dad had a welding shop and I would be coming off tour and pulling up on the corner and he’d be sitting on top of a crate, just shriveled up. But he was still my king, still my dad. My brother tried to fill the void, but your dad is your king, for a little girl. He’s the one that tells you that you are a princess, you are beautiful. He trains you to know that a man should open a car door for you.”
NEXT PAGE: Foxy talks Jay-Z and conversations with Pam Grier
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On getting permission to use the name “Foxy Brown”
“Foxy Brown was Pam Grier. I was 15 years old and she told me, ‘I’ve done damage to this name.’ In the ’70s, every dude wanted to… and every girl wanted to be her. She told me, ‘I want you to make your Foxy bigger than my Foxy.’”On her brothers always having her back
“The one thing that I’m very grateful is that I did nothing without my two brothers, Anton and Gavin. It’s unheard of to put your brothers on the cover of XXL. XXL said, ‘We don’t put people’s brothers and sisters on the cover. Are you kidding me?’ It was for us getting our own subsidiary label. We had a real joint venture with Def Jam and it was huge… I was like, ‘They have to be on the cover with me.’”On her relationship with Jay-Z
“Jay was always Jay. He was always that dude, whether it was him going out of town and in the streets, he was always that dude. Where I came in, I don’t think Jay himself… Clark wanted it for myself and Jay more than we even wanted it. But I don’t think Jay saw past ‘Can’t Knock the Hustle,’ the streets. And [then] my records crossed over and went pop and they were Number One all over and ‘Ain’t No Nigga,’ the format of that record is so hip-hop.”NEXT PAGE: Foxy explains how she lost her hearing and Jay-Z’s reaction
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On re-signing with Def Jam again
“50 said to me when Jay became president and I went back to Def Jam, ‘I will triple Jay’s offer to you if you come with me. What’s your allegiance to this dude?’ This is who I come from. It’s in my DNA.”On the day she lost her hearing
“It was the morning of the funeral, so imagine. I was in Brooklyn. I wasn’t home in Jersey. This was my mom’s younger sister, she passed away from cancer. And Jay was leaving to go out of the country and found out, cancelled his trip and said, this is family. I need to be here… When I woke up [on the morning of the funeral] it was so quiet. It was a quiet you would never know. It was a quiet that I’ve learned to make work for me now, because I had to mentally find a way to flip it to my advantage and say, well, the serenity that I hear when I have that moment, I can sit down and read a book. I can sit down and create and I don’t hear the normal wind. There was absolutely no sound. It’s a sound that will drive you crazy. Jays the funeral, my family’s at the funeral… I got on my knees… I said, ‘God, what’s happening to my world?’”On telling Jay-Z she’d lost her hearing
“He’s there [at the church] waiting and he’s like, ‘I have to talk to you.’ I can’t pick up the phone ’cause I can’t hear so I just go straight there. He tells me something in my ear, and I say, ‘Jay, I can’t hear you’… I’ve never seen him that emotional. He looked broken. He said, ‘Can you hear?’ I said, ‘No.’”Photo Credit: urbanislandz.com