Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown Start Beef with Simon & Shuster

They've had a rivalry that dates back to the 90s, but Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim finally have something in common: Both female rappers are being sued by book publisher Simon & Shuster after failing to make good on their respective book deals. Both women received tens of thousands in advance money for books that haven't been written. In the case of Lil' Kim, the Queen Bee signed a deal in 2004 to pen a novel and took in $40,000 up front. Unless Lil' Kim writes at a Salinger-like pace, it's safe to assume there's no Lil' Kim novel on the horizon. Brown, meanwhile, signed a deal with S&S in 2006 to write an autobiography entitled Broken Silence. She received $75,000 in advances, and that was before Brooklyn's Don Diva served jail time. Brown likely had adequate time behind bars to at least write a first draft, but S&S once again never got a manuscript.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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