Queen Latifah reigns on and off TV - rap singer and television actress

Ebony, Dec, 1993 by Aldore Collier

Talented female rapper dons a new hat as a sitcom star and record company owner

ANOTHER hectic rehearsal of the Fox Television hit, Living Single, is wrapping up in Burkbank, Calif. After a few minutes of chitchat, cast and crew depart in their cars, vans amd Jeeps. All except Queen Latifah, the rapper-turned-actress. Clad in overalls, hiking boots and a sweatshirt, she grabs a helmet, tosses her sandy hair, jumps on her motocycle and zooms off for home into the Hollywood Hills.

For Queen Latifah comfort supersedes looks any day. "Some girls would not wear this at all," she says. "They would feel boyish. I feel comfortable and I wear what I like. Some people place feminity on the exterior, but it's inside. That doesn't bother me."

Feminity actually is part of the monkier she adopted several years ago. She was born Dana Owens in East Orange, N.J. A cousin gave her the name Latifah, which she says means feminine and nice. "I picked Queen," she says. I don't want to be typical. MC was everything back then. Everybody was MC Latifah didn't want to be like that. MC Latifah didn't sound right. I felt good saying queen. so it struck."

With that regal title also came a crown that she wore while performing At 23, Queen Latifah is a rap music superstar whose popularity is soaring far beyond the confines of that music genre. She has appeared in such films as Jungle Fever, Juice, House Party II and Who's the Man? She performed in several segments of the NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and has a major role in the upcoming film, My Life with Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman. In that movie, she is cast as a hospice nurse helping a dying man and his family deal with his final days.

Her greatest exposure thus far has come in Living Single, where she portrays Khadijah James, one of four professional Black women trying to make it in New York City. The others are Kim Fields, Kim Coles and Erika Alexander. In the series, which has consistently attracted a substantial audience in its time slot (Sundays 8:30 p.m. EST), she plays the owner of the fictional magazine Flavor.

Flavor (actually Flavor Unit Records and Management) also happens to be the name of the record label she has formed, and its products are distributed by Motown. Two of the rapper/actress' albums, All Hail the Queen and Nature of a Sista, have experienced worldwide success, and her third release, Black Reign, is climbing the charts.

In addition to being a performer, Latifah is also a businessman. She is chief executive officer of Flavor Unit and manages more than a dozen rap acts such as Apache, Naughty by Nature and Nicki D.

The business part of her career, she says, basically evolved out of necessity. She never had a manager and learned on her own how to negotiate deals. Soon, she began helping other rap friends she had known since childhood, and eventually she began managing them. Even while working on the set of Living Single, she gets weekly, and sometimes daily, updates on the company's operations.

As a kid, she loved rap music and saw it as a way to make money and have fun. "I just loved the music," she says. "My friends inspired me to get into it. None of us was making any money. We were broke kids but we had a lot of big dreams. We all wanted the Benzes, BMWs, to wear the Guccis and Louis Vuitton. Rap was how we wanted to make our money instead of being drug dealers."

At 16, she made her first demo. And it went nowhere. "We just tried to get it played on the radio in New York," she says. "It was still a hobby then. My dream was just to get the record played. They were playing other stuff that we thought was garbage."

She was in summer school preparing to go to college in Manhattan when she got the call that her second effort had attracted the attention of Tommy Boy Records.

Initially, having a record contract did not deter her from pursuing a college degree. "I was going to college regardless. I was at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in lower Manhattan when the success came," says Latifah, who was thinking about majoring in broadcast journalism. Rap success, however, took a toll on her academic pursuits and she decided to put them on hold for a while. When things settle down, she says, the first order of business will be to get that college degree.

Although required to spend ample time on the West Coast, she says the area around Newark and Jersey City, N.J., will always be her primary domain. In Los Angeles she has a large, Southwestern-style home in the hills overlooking canyons and valleys. "Los Angeles is cool, but I don't care how many mountains and valleys you put there, I love the New York skyline," she says. "There's nothing that impresses me more. I've been around the world and whenever I come back and see the skyline, I am just in awe. When I pass it on a clear day, it's just like 'Wow!' And I love being in the city. I just love it."

She makes these observations while relaxing, or as she says, "chillin'," on her deck watching the sun slowly descend behind nearby mountains. As she pulls out a cigaret and begins to smoke, she says: "I'm trying to quit. I'm reading the American Cancer Society's book on smoking. It's more addictive than anything else. There are no purposes, no benefits [to smoking]. It's the worst addiction because it's hard to break. I'm not ashamed, but I am trying to quit. Plus, my mother hates smoking."