A ’70s blaxploitation film icon from classics like Foxy Brown and Coffy, Pam Grier found new life in Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 Jackie Brown. Since then, it’s much more than just boomers who understand what an important figure Grier was for Black women in film.
She’s now the focus of the fourth season of TCM’s The Plot Thickens podcast and Grier settled in with Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield to talk about her legacy and ongoing ambitions. Among them, Grier revealed that she’s scheming to be on the big screen with Cardi B and expressed her reverence for other Black women who are crossing over from music to the silver screen.
“I’m writing something for me and Cardi B,” Grier said when asked about being a touchstone for today’s cross-generational icons. “I love Cardi and ‘WAP.’ I love Megan Thee Stallion. I told her, ‘You and your artistry are beautiful. People are gonna punk you because a stallion is a male horse, but there’s some really foxy mares!’
“She’s really good. She went to college,” she said about Megan, before expanding into her thoughts on other stars. “You got to have your goals. You’re gonna have haters, you’re gonna have jealousy, but just do your art, do your passion from your heart. She [Megan] and Lizzo and Nicki Minaj and some of the others, they know — you gotta make your own style. You get to hire people later. But you come up with your own stuff, then you just draw people like a magnet, so collaborators make you greater and greater. I want them to find that.”
Grier, who also played music with Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, also cited working with Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson as moments that shaped her into a well-rounded artist and added one last bit of advice for Cardi, Meg, Nicki, Lizzo, and others: “But any kind of artist, you’re like a musician, and you don’t know if you’re gonna be heard 40, 50 years later. This music may not be passed on by other artisans. But it’s nice if your music is still played generations later.”
Some of the artists mentioned here are Warner Music artists. .
