I wasn't a huge fan, but there was some cool stuff. This quote stuck out to me.


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"That time in music history was just phenomenal... I don't think there will ever be another movement that way, ever." -Eve
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Eve is ready to look back on her early years in the music industry on Ruff Ryders Chronicles. The five-part BET series kicked off last week, recounting the rise of the legendary Ruff Ryders Entertainment in the late '90s and 2000s. The label was founded by siblings Joaquin "Waah" Dean, Darin "Dee" Dean and Chivon Dean, built around Yonkers, New York, rappers DMX and The Lox, and later included Jadakiss, Drag-On, Jin, producer Swizz Beatz and the Ruff Ryders' First Lady herself, Eve.

"I was the most protected female on the planet at that time," the rapper, actress and host of The Talk tells ET's Kevin Frazier. "I was Baby Sis, but not like, coddled. Baby Sis in a way that you were gonna protect, she hustles with us."

"That time in music history was just phenomenal... I don't think there will ever be another movement that way, ever."
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Eve signed to the Ruff Ryders label after a brief stint with Dr. Dre and Aftermath, and recalls her once-in-a-lifetime introduction into the rap game came after a chance encounter with rapper Mase when she was working as a stripper -- or, as she jokes, "the laziest stripper on the planet."

"It was a slow night and this guy comes walking in, and one of the girls who I hung out with was like, 'Yo that's that new kid, he just got signed to Puff,'" she remembers. "I go over there and I'm kinda just like, 'Yeah, what's up, you want a dance?'... He just laughed, actually, and he was like, 'What do you wanna do with your life?' And I was like, 'You don't know me, don't be asking about me!' Long story short, he literally was like 'You're not supposed to be here. What is it that you wanna do?' I told him I wanna be a rapper, and he was like, 'Get dressed, let's go ride around the city and listen to some beats.'"

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"We literally just rolled around the city until the sun came up. He listened to me rap. I never saw him again from that night until I got signed to Ruff Ryders... and he would come up to the studio almost every day while I was doing my first album, and just was such a supportive person. He opened up a church in Atlanta years after, and I was always telling people he was supposed to do that, he knows some things, and that he sent me a message that I needed to hear at that time. It was incredible."


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"It wasn't just about the bottle poppin' and all that. I don't even think we were really into that, it was really more about just celebrating how excited we were to be in that time... We were a movement, and we knew it, and we were a family."

Her biggest mainstream crossover came with her GRAMMY-winning 2001 Gwen Stefani collab, "Let Me Blow Ya Mind," which, along with lead single "Who's That Girl?," helped propel her sophomore album, Scorpion, to platinum status and a GRAMMY nomination of its own.

"She gave me an audience I didn't have. And vice versa, I gave her an audience she didn't have," Eve notes of collaborating with the No Doubt lead singer. "I've always been a huge No Doubt fan, a huge Gwen fan, and we were the same label and I was like, 'Why not make this happen?'"

"As much as she was a girly girl like I was, she was a tomboy like I was. So I recognized that in her, I knew it was gonna work."

The pair have stayed in touch over the years, touring together and recently performing their second collab, "Rich Girl," on The Voice in celebration of the 15th anniversary of Stefani's album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. "We try to text, we try to email. But when we see each other, it's all love. It's all giggles and squeezes."

As for the Ruff Ryders, Eve has nothing but fond memories of her time with the label,...

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These days, Eve is quarantining in London with husband Maximillion Cooper and their familiy, and preparing to return to work on the upcoming season of The Talk. "We're all in a situation now where we are figuring it out, like we always do," she said of reuniting with her co-hosts for new episodes of the roundtable show. "I'm excited, 'cause I don't even know what's happening yet. Because we have been on hiatus, we've kind of been checking in, but no one knows anything, so it's gonna be huge. It always is -- we do that very well."

As for what she'd tell her younger self -- the struggling stripper hoping to make it in the rap game -- of her more than two-decade career, Eve has nothing but gratitude.

"There are days I wake up and I'm like, 'I live in London!'" she admits. "I would tell [my younger self] don't be scared of how big you want to dream. Don't think that you can't have this much... Trust your instincts, you actually have good instincts. That took me a lot of years to come back to."

http://www.msn.com/en-us/music/celebrity/eve-talks-looking-back-on-her-early-rap-days-in-ruff-ryders-chronicles-exclusive/ar-BB18asDV?ocid=ientp

This series was a lot better than I was expecting. The Lox stuff was interesting and entertaining but I really felt for Eve. Good for her for winning in life- she may be the best off these days of all of the original Ruff Ryder crew. Speaking of which, gotta lotta love for my dog DMX and I really felt for his testimony.