Comedian Jasmin Leigh is well known to hip-hop fans as one-half of People’s Party with Talib Kweli — the podcast produced by Uproxx and shared on Luminary and YouTube each week. Her enthusiasm and warmth offer a nice balance to Kweli’s encyclopedic understanding of music and culture. She consistently adds levity, while never shying away from deeply incisive questions.
This week, to mark People’s Party‘s 150th episode, Leigh and poet Jessica Care Moore turned the tables on Kweli — putting him in the guest’s chair. In the run-up to that episode launch, we tapped Leigh to talk about what reaching 150 episodes means to her and asked about the ascendancy of women in rap plus some of her favorite moments from this marathon run.
As an insider — who maybe has a different view than the fans do — what is your favorite episode of the show?
I feel like… Okay, so I have so many favorites, but if I have to wind it down, we’ll say the Jadakiss episode, because the verse he wrote for Puffy is one of my favorite verses — so me being able to rap that was great and I always fuck up the words. I can know a song forward and backwards, and I’m still going to fuck up the words, but I didn’t quite fuck up the words. Sorry, if I’m not supposed to be cursing [laughs].
But yeah, so I got to rap it. It was on the spot, rap it and I was just like, “Oh God,” and I did it, so that would have to be my favorite episode. If I could do another favorite, it would have to be the one that I fangirl the most out of, which was Lil’ Kim.
That’s understandable!
I love Lil’ Kim. I absolutely love Lil’ Kim. I was a part of Junior M.A.F.I.A. You couldn’t tell me that I wasn’t! [laughs]
Money, Power & Respect! Do you remember when that dropped?!
Listen! And I shouldn’t even be singing her songs and most of her songs. Like I couldn’t sing, but she was commercial so a lot of her stuff was on the radio. So yeah, Lil’ Kim, and then we did Lady Marmalade — me and a couple of my girlfriends — and I did Lil’ Kim’s part and I showed her the video, and she started following me on Instagram and I was just like… [gasps]
Does it get cooler? I don’t know if it gets cooler than that!
It doesn’t. It really doesn’t, and she’s still following me right now!
That is dope. Now… what has doing 150 episodes taught you about yourself, and what has it taught you about just what it means to function at this level of hip-hop? I mean — you’re one of the realest black women on the realest show, in the realest time. So tell us about that.
It’s definitely forced me to challenge myself in numerous ways, challenge myself in how to deal with public opinions, challenge myself in how to deal with constructive criticism within my team, challenge myself just being able to be able to speak up, and have a voice in more times than not male-dominated interviews just because we typically interview men.
Right. It’s just a lopsided situation — the way that hip-hop is — just because so many dudes rap!
Right, it’s just how hip-hop is. So there are a lot of women in hip-hop, but we have interviewed a lot of men so that has definitely been a challenge. And then just being able to film multiple episodes, because we don’t typically do one episode at a time, and so some interviews I will be high energy, because the person is maybe lower energy, and then the other ones will be low energy because the guest has plenty of energy to give — so just knowing when to give and when to pull back.
There’ve just been so many things that I’ve learned. I didn’t even realize that we were at 150 episodes and then it’s like, “Wow, we’ve been doing this for three years now.” It’s crazy.
That said, accomplishing and experiencing everything that you have, what would you like to see? Where would you like to see the show go from here? Have you visualized any new ways, aspects, angles, ideas that you can share?
Well, I actually love how the show is now. I love that Talib is really not for the fluff, and I’m a fluff person so it comes for me anyway. But the fact that we don’t focus on it and we focus on real issues and real conversations, and things that are not necessarily the popular topic or in the blogs and stuff like that, so I really love that aspect of the show and I’m looking forward to more people catching on.
I’m also looking forward to us going and doing more live episodes. I had so much fun in Austin to South-by-Southwest [SXSW] traveling and getting to do interviews in a different place with artists that may not have been readily available in LA, and doing in their home state so that was really fun. And I loved the energy of an audience, so I’m looking forward to that for sure.
For more on Jasmin Leigh check out the 150th episode of Peoples Party with Talib Kweli.