Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Brandy, Eve back in ‘Queens’ as all-girl hip-hop group members
The ’90s are making a comeback — with a little help from music idols Brandy and Eve.
ABC’s “Queens,” which recently premiered, finds the two real-life ’90s performers playing former members of a fictional all-girl hip-hop group who get back together years after their heyday.
The other members of the glitzy group, all mature adults now, are played by Naturi Naughton and Nadine Velazquez.
“I’ve never seen four women in a group that rap,” Brandy, 42, said. “There’s been hip-hop guy groups, but I’ve never seen hip-hop girl groups.”
The singer added: “Usually there’s been times where one female is celebrated as the rapper, with all of these guys. Even Eve was part of the Ruff Ryders. It was just one girl for each crew. But I’ve never seen four women together doing it, and so I just think that’s a beautiful way to kind of rewrite history with this show by putting us all together.”
Estranged for the better part of two decades, Christian housewife Jill (Naughton), mother of five Brianna (Eve), acoustic singer Naomi (Brandy) and TV host Valeria (Velazquez) are drawn back to the stage by the promise of a revival.
The show switches between the 1990s, when they were huge stars — and often at odds — and the present day, as they try to regain the spotlight despite old wounds and new challenges.
“This show gives us a way to show sisterhood,” Naughton said. “You often see women at each other’s throats and fighting and catty. I’m just so refreshed by the ways the writers are giving these women drama, but because they really love each other. At the core of it, they really care about what they’re doing.”
Naughton, one-third of the late-’90s R&B group 3LW alongside Adrienne Bailon and Kiely Williams, joked that she was able to revisit some of her own experiences for the show, which certainly isn’t short on drama.
But in “Queens,” the drama is more heightened than just catty backstabbing. “It felt like a grown … woman show, not a little girl show,” Velazquez, 42, said.
Velazquez, the only one of the stars without a platinum record, called it “extra special” to experience the ’90s music scene that Eve, Brandy and Naughton lived. Now, she joked, she gets to pretend she lived it, too.
For the others, the show is a throwback to their own realities, or a version of them, at least.
“The ’90s was a very, very special era. And
I feel like the ’90s are coming back, not just with ‘Queens,’ but it has been coming. It’s been resurfacing,” Brandy said.
“It was a special time.
It’s magical. So to be able to relive that and relive it
... and tell a certain story, I think … that’s great.”
The fact that the show stars women who actually experienced the highs and lows of what their characters went through gives “Queens” a realistic edge, said Eve, one of the first female rappers to achieve huge success back in the late 1990s.
“There was so much excitement and happiness behind hip-hop, and lots of authenticity behind hip-hop in the ’90s,” Eve, 42, said.
“Being able to do it from a woman’s point of view makes it even that much stronger. Being able to do it through women of color makes it even that much stronger. Being able to do it with women who were from that era for real brings it all the way home.”