"Don’t be afraid to go beyond the internet."
A conversation about making it all work with veteran editor, Black is King co-writer, and author of The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip-Hop, Clover Hope.
Rap magazines were my first music journalism love. I read The Source and Vibe obsessively through middle school and high school. Clover Hope is someone I’ve admired for a long time, as a voracious reader of XXL, particularly in the late aughts when Elliott Wilson was EIC and publishing each issue with barb-wired editor’s letters. Clover has also been an editor at Vibe Magazine and Jezebel where was a staff writer and then culture editor until September of last year. (As culture editor, Clover assigned me a profile of Carly Rae Jepsen and heeded my badgering until okaying a profile of my perennial Drag Race fave Katya Zamolodchikova. Thank you, Clover!!!)
If you like reading about pop culture, you’ve probably seen Clover’s work. In the last few years she’s written features on Michaela Cole, Keke Palmer, Regina King, Normani, Megan Thee Stallion, and Beyoncé, who enlisted Clover as a co-writer with poet Yrsa Daley-Ward for Black is King, the Disney+ film version of her Lion King mixtape. That’s, like, kind of a lot, right? To write cover stories for WSJ Magazine and Vogue and Cosmo and dabble in screenwriting for this century’s most significant pop star all while working full-time on the blog grind? Well, she wrote a book, too: The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip-Hop. It is a lovingly constructed collection of essays and profiles about everyone from MC Sha-Rock and Queen Latifah to Cardi B and Azealia Banks. I was so excited to talk to Clover, who is now a contributing editor at Pitchfork, about the massive undertaking that was writing this book and how the hell one woman can do so many things. (Spoiler: Forget about sleep.)
I think a lot about the lowkey terror of a change in plans or the realization that the original format is not the right one in a writing project. In your interview with Jayson Rodriguez, you mentioned that the book you published was not the book you pitched. How did you know you needed to make an adjustment and what did you do to make it?
I had a record scratch in the movie moment during one of the earlier interviews, maybe it was with Charli Baltimore. She was giving me so much of her time and really going through her story in detail. It wasn’t what I had planned on getting from her, it was much more in-depth. It was during those early interviews that I realized that I would have to make myself go beyond the call of duty. I really felt like I needed to speak to these women and tell and cherish their stories. They hadn’t talked about their experiences that in depth in years. Charli Baltimore, Solé — I hadn’t known anything about Solé’s story other than she had a song with JT Money† and she kinda like disappeared. She talked a lot about not wanting to be in the industry and how she kind of fell out of love with it and was very ok with falling out of love with it. She wrestled with the content she was making lyrically. She wrestled with making explicit content. Hearing those stories was when I realized I’d have to do more interviews. I hadn’t planned on making it this expansive. I had thought there was no way I could get everyone in, so I wasn’t even gonna try. And then I was like, You know what? Maybe I’ll try to get everyone. I tried to make it feel like I actually had everyone. Obviously there’s people who aren’t in it or up-and-coming names who aren’t mentioned. My whole thing with the plus-sign in the title is that it holds so much more than 100 women. I really wanted to hold their stories and really tell them delicately and I knew I had to speak to them and speak to people who worked with them. I kind of treated it like a write-around profile, especially for the artists who I didn’t get to speak to.
And you know how terrifying that is. You want to tell a really thorough story, you have to do 200% instead of what you planned on doing. When I first met with my editor, the book was just going to be profiles and not necessarily have deep reporting. But I definitely didn’t want it to be generic, so that was how it changed.
Charli Baltimore was such a big one for me. I loved her.
Charli was a big one for me, too. She really steered the story toward writing and ghostwriting. I kind of hand angles for each artist. For MC Lyte, I knew I wanted to talk about her voice. With Queen Latifah, it was moving into acting and being one of the first rapper-actors and longevity. With [Lil] Kim, I just wanted to talk about how people talk about her. With Charli Baltimore, I didn’t necessarily have an angle but speaking to her gave me an angle. Through her I could talk about women and writing and rap and how there’s unspoken rule that women get men to write their rhymes and how that’s not actually true for a lot of women. I was able to tell that larger story through her and she gave me that. I would have had that in the book but having it there through her is interesting.
Your magazine experience is really present throughout the book — it’s design-oriented, there’s a lot of information in succinct bites. How did you come up with the format?
The magazine and front of the book mindset came in unintentionally. I edited front of book for Vibe and XXL which had infographics, charticles, visual things, so I guess I had that muscle. I knew I didn’t want to do a straight narrative. We had already decided there would be illustrations for as many women as possible, so I knew it would be broken up. I knew I wanted to work in bullet points because I didn’t want the entries to be totally biography but I did want you to be able to flip through it and very quickly know about the person. At first it was a fun fact, an abridged biography, and song to listen to. I figured that out early on because I wanted it to be both digestible as a coffee table book and as a narrative piece of work. I decided that each entry would have an angle — what’s this person’s contribution to hip-hop or what is the thing. If you were telling a story about Yo-Yo, it would be that she was one of the earlier hip-hop feminists and that’s the angle for her. I could talk about battle rap through Roxanne Shanté. I listed each artist and came up with an angle for each of them. Some of them changed but that did help as a starting point.
What was your research process like outside of the interviews?
One of the first things I did was look up who on the list had already written their own book because that is the best way to find someone’s story other than interviewing them. I bought all those books: Queen Latifah, Pepa, Antoinette, MC Sha Rock, Sheri Sher, The Mercedes Ladies. I bought those books and read through those as research material for those women. Luckily, I got to speak to most of them and used the books to inform the questions and used the information in the books for the entries. I also went on eBay and got older magazines. Some of the magazines came from Australia. I knew I wanted to write about the Foxy Brown and Lil Kim Source cover. I got an issue of The Source with Missy and Timbaland on the cover, an old Lauryn Hill Source issue. I couple of XXLs. I already had some Vibes. Vibe is also just easier to work with because it’s on Google Books. I knew that some of these stories were already in the rap mags, they covered a lot of these women, they spoke to them, so that was a research point. Hip-Hop Divas was this other publication Vibe put together in the mid-2000s. It was basically profiles of different women in hip-hop written by different writers. That was a really great resource especially because I didn’t want to cover the same — obviously I’m gonna cover the same background story but I didn’t want it to be rehash. I was, thankfully, able to get a lot of women who weren’t in that book. Kathy Iandoli’s God Save the Queens came out while I was working on my book. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t overlapping too much with her book. I really wanted it to be different and me, in my voice, so that was a later resource. Newspapers, also, I have a newspaper dot com subscription and that was helpful for looking at old stories. When I write about how The Sequence were described early as “female rappers” that was just something I found in an old newspaper.
What advice would you give to someone who needs to go on an archival material journey?
Ask around. Ask reporter friends who do deep-dives what resources they use. Even if they cover a different subject matter, there might be ways you could use those resources for your own dives. And just be organized. I’m an organizational freak and I would have been all over the place if I didn’t have spreadsheets and folders. I had a fact-checker, so I really tried to keep things in order so I knew where I’d gotten something from. Don’t be afraid to go beyond the internet, whether it’s the library or older magazines or actual people who can tell you things. I really wanted to have primary sources for a lot of this stuff.
What’s something you wish you’d known before you got started with the book?
I initially had a shorter deadline to work on this. I already knew I was not going to get it done in that time. It was just a few months for writing and I knew that I could not finish a book in a few months but I said yes. When we got closer to the first deadline, I kept pushing it, I said I needed to do more, I still have people to speak to. The actual pub date was supposed to be September but Corona basically pushed it back, which I guess was fortuitous because I think it came out at a good time. I was worried I would miss the timing. When I was working on it, so many women were popping up and becoming more popular. But I was worried Cardi’s or Megan’s momentum would stop and no one would care about women rappers anymore. The opposite happened and that is kind of crazy. I wish I would have known that so I could take my time because I rushed through some of the beginning and ended up doing double work and doubling back on certain entries because I wasn’t happy with the original.
How was collaborating with an illustrator?
I have experience working with illustrators and designers, so that came in handy when we were designing the pages. The designer Diane [Shaw] was amazing. She was great at making sure the infographics fit each person’s style. It was like going back to my magazine days and that was fun. I wanted to find a Black woman illustrator and I saw Rachelle [Baker]’s stuff while I was researching people and I just really liked her style and aesthetic. I immediately gravitated toward her. She mapped out a bunch of mock-ups and the first few illustrations, they were so good. Foxy, Eve, and Lauryn were in her first batch of illustrations. We would go back and forth and I would give some direction if I wanted to tweak likeness or style. Some of the styles changed a little bit in terms of contrast and colors. It mostly us doing our individual working, regrouping, going back to work and so on.
Can I ask how it was to work as a screenwriter after so many years of journalism?
When I was working on Black is King, the thing that it reactivated in me the most was that collaborative spirit. Being able to write with other people was new to me. Writing with Yrsa Daley-Ward, who came onto the project first, was new to me. It was a good challenge to tap into that other side, like putting together a print publication. Screenwriting is a different muscle but sort of similar to making a magazine. I wanna do more of it. I had done some amateur screenwriting, a little short a few years ago, and a feature with another writer, so I had some experience. But I do wanna see where that goes. I’m working on a YouTube project for Black History Month and that’s a production, so it’s similarly putting pieces together. I would like to do more of it, I do enjoy the process.
I should probably ask: How did you balance working a full-time job and doing all of these other creative projects?
It was very difficult. I just have weird hours. I like to write between 8 and 3am, so a lot of the writing stuff I do tends to be in that time after work hours anyway. There are some days when I have a double shift and I just stay up really late and sacrifice a little bit of sleep to finish something because a lot of times I have the most creativity during those midnight hours. I just kind of make myself do those double shifts, which I don't recommend. It does take a toll. I have to take breaks after I do a series of projects. It is a lot. I just use whatever extra hours I have. I would schedule interviews for the book after work and just transcribe little by little. That is one thing I should have done: I should have had a research assistant or someone. I transcribed everything. I did all of that. I think because it was my first book, I wanted to do it on my own and really get the experience but maybe for the next one I would get some help.
The Toolkit
At the end of every Read You, Wrote You interview, I ask the writer what tools they use in their writing practice. This is what’s in Sasha Geffen’s toolkit for…
Blogging
This is maybe not good. At Jezebel, we did a lot of work from home and I do like having some TV on in the background, even if I’m not fully watching it. Either music or TV, whether that’s a news show or something a little bit mindless. I just like having something I can see or hear on. Feedly was my no. 1 thing, I always had that open in a tab. I had a bunch of feeds sorted into folders — culture, entertainment. Green tea is one, too. I try to do coffee more regularly but I get jitters at night and then I can’t sleep, so tea is better for me. I like having my plants around. It gives me life and it feels like I’m in a peaceful environment, so I do like having some on my desk.
Features
Definitely Scrivener, which I use for organizing transcripts and audio. That’s how I put the pieces together. I use a transcription tool for profile writing. I make a research packet, I’m really neurotic about not repeating information from other people’s pieces. I want my piece to be distinct. I keep notebooks, too, where I jot things down like phrases or when I’m interviewing someone over the phone or something, I’ll actually write down my follow up questions instead of doing it on the computer.
Celebrity profiles
The last couple I did were especially hard because they had to be over Zoom. It was Regina King and Michaela Cole, so it was literally less access because I’m not seeing them in person. At that point, it’s really about research and attention to detail. For Keke, that was last interview I did before Corona, she was one of the last people I saw in person, we went to a nail shop and we did the photoshoot. That was a good amount of time but I always want more and publicists don’t wanna give you more time. I try to really make sure my questions are focused and I’m not asking questions I can find the answer to somewhere else. There are some things that may have to be rehashed, like background, but if there’s limited access, I want to make sure my questions are targeted and that I don’t have bubblegum questions.
Editing
I’ve been using Microsoft Word instead of Google Docs because it feels more writerly. I go back and forth but I like to use Word for edits specifically. Since I’ve gone freelance, I have multiple email addresses, so I’ve organized my inbox differently for each publication. The way I organize my Pitchfork email is different from my Vice inbox. I use labels so I can have a sense of the flow of pieces that I’m editing. Inbox organization.
† I wrote about JT Money and Solé’s “Who Dat” for The Rap Yearbook!
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