Just ask Lil’ Kim—being a hip-hop moll ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you rap badly, people assume you’re a sex toy. If you rap well, people assume you didn’t write the rhymes…and that you’re a sex toy. Worst of all, you have to remain faithful, meaning, in Kim’s case, catching a jail sentence for trying to protect your late mentor/sugar daddy’s crew. But while Lil’ Kim has always been in the Notorious B.I.G.’s shadow, for a time she thrived there, happy to play his ostentatious, potty-mouthed sidekick, as if fealty to the rap legend gave her sustenance. The Naked Truth, though, marks a long-overdue split, not because Big Poppa’s ghost isn’t here—she quotes him on “Spell Check” and samples him on “All Good”—but because, for the first time, Kim imagines a life beyond homage.

This is easily Kim’s strongest work since her pheromone-thick 1996 debut, Hard Core, because all of a sudden, she’s flexible—artistically, that is. She borrows flows from Bone Thugs-N-Harmony (“We Don’t Give a Fuck”) and LL Cool J (the prog bellydance number “Kitty Box”), while “Lighters Up” is sharp, loping dancehall (though in all fairness, Kim’s nemesis Foxy Brown nailed this style four years ago on the excellent Broken Silence).

On the squiggly “Shut Up Bitch,” the Queen Bee compellingly gripes about the scrutiny that comes with fame (or, more precisely, with fame and plastic surgery), but Kim is always at her best on the offensive. Take “Quiet,” a rip-off of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” so unlikely and shameless it feels like innovation. In a wheezing voice, Kim sends barbs at Foxy Brown, former homey Lil Cease and, possibly, 50 Cent (the Game raps the hook, as if to drive home the point). She sounds angry, uncertain and, most crucially, alive.

On the moody, slick “Slippin’,” though, Kim laments her “public humiliation, poor representation, guilty by association.” It’s the sound of a woman whose bubble has finally burst and who realizes that loyalty won’t sustain her, but music might.

DOWNLOAD: “Quiet,” “Lighters Up,” “Slippin’”