The Original Spice Girls

Being a member of Salt-N-Pepa, the most successful female rap group of all time, has its stressful moments. After a long morning of interviews and radio appearances, the pressure isenough to drive one member of the trio up a wall.

“Stop that!” yells Salt (real name: Cheryl James) with a playful laugh as Spinderella (Dee Dee Roper), the group’s deejay, stretches her lithe frame from wall to wall of the narrow hallway of her West Hollywood hotel, using her hands and feet to work her way toward the ceiling. She climbs quickly, reaching her goal in a matter of seconds. Pepa (Sandy Denton), also smiling, urges her friend to get down before she injures herself.

“I used to do that all the time as a little girl in the projects,” Roper says matter-of-factly.

The women regain composure and link arms as a photographer takes photos. They take different poses, one moment exuding cool sex appeal, the next silliness, but always with a warmth and familiarity with each other that demonstrates unity. They’re performers, mothers--and sisters.

After thousands of shows, hundreds of hours of studio time, not to mention the shared hotel rooms and airplane flights, it seems that the women of Salt-N-Pepa still find being around each other a pleasurable experience.

“We have a lot of fun,” Denton says. “We support each other a lot especially when we’re on the road, because it’s lonely, and we want to be with our kids. So we get together, laugh at stupid stuff and play silly games, acting like little kids.”

Not that they don’t realize what the media is saying about them. No group that’s been together for more than a decade gets along so well--do they?

“This is the real Salt-N-Pepa,” James says with sarcasm, frowning wearily as she looks at the ground, her fingers at her temples.

Denton takes the baton and runs with it.

“No, this is the real Salt-N-Pepa,” she says, giving the camera an angry look and extending her middle finger.

The trio laugh long and hard.

“Stop,” James says. “We don’t want to get any other rumors started.”

It’s been an eventful year for the rap trio, one of change. Their latest album, titled “Brand New” (see review, Page 90), is the first they’ve ever recorded without the writing and producing touch of Hurby “Luvbug” Azor, the peer who discovered, inspired and nurtured their talent.

They’ve also switched labels, leaving a lucrative MCA records deal for a multi-album contract with Red Ant Entertainment, which also includes a joint venture record label, Jireh, that the women co-own with Red Ant. (The first release on the label will be Spinderella’s solo LP, tentatively titled “Spinderella’s Ball.”)

The reasons that the group cites for the MCA split are different from the ones described by sources familiar with the situation. The group says it was a question of support, saying that the label wanted the group to follow directions that they didn’t feel comfortable with.

But according to one source, “Basically it was an expensive deal, and when [MCA] listened to the new album without Hurby’s songs, coupled with the amount of time it took for them to complete the project, and three singles that didn’t happen, [MCA] decided it was better letting them go.

“And the girls are high maintenance, with $5,000 worth of clothes with every appearance, first class air fare, suites, expensive videos--there’s no way a company can recoup on this record.”

However, Reginald C. Dennis, editor in chief of the hip-hop-slanted XXL magazine, doesn’t feel that Azor’s departure is the worst thing that could happen to the trio.

“People just seem to like Salt-N-Pepa, and it’s hard to find anyone to say anything bad about them. . . . They somehow have always existed outside of the competitive hip-hop arena,” he says. “After 10 years, they probably want their own ideas out there. You’ll notice that Hurby had no success with groups outside of Salt-N-Pepa after Kid N’ Play fell off. I wouldn’t call him a super-producer. Some of their best songs, like ‘Shoop,’ they produced themselves.”

The women are also trying to balance the role of being mothers, with Denton’s son, Tyran, 7, James’ daughter, Corin, 6, and Roper’s daughter, Christenese, 5. Not to mention a Rolling Stone cover story making allusions that there has been a fundamental change of influences, with James saying at one point that the only way she would make another Salt-N-Pepa record is if there are no more sexually suggestive songs like “Push It” or “Shoop.”

“It’s been sequels of drama, and we ain’t through going through it yet,” James says, sitting at a table in her hotel suite with her two partners.

“But we’re ready for it. We have internal issues, and we have to be honest about it and be able to express ourselves openly, and say, ‘This is how I feel. . . . I don’t know if you meant it like that.’ ”

“We’re three separate individuals,” Roper says, “and you have to be able to accept each person for who they are.”

“But we’re supportive and respectful of each other individually,” Denton adds. “We support each other wholeheartedly. We’re like a marriage that will never end in divorce, no matter what.”

Cheryl James and Sandy Denton are more than just partners who trade off rhyme verses, the female version of Run-DMC. When Denton had her son, James was her Lamaze coach. They’ve been inseparable since they met at Queensborough Community College in New York in 1985. When they should have been in class, they were hanging out with other students in the lunchroom.

“I was always introverted, off to myself,” the short, slender James says. There’s nothing shy about her appearance today: dyed red hair and a form-fitting black shirt that follows every inch of her sculpted frame.

“I always sat in the corner with my long matronly dresses. Pep was ripe and vivacious,” James says, smiling at her friend. “Her hair was always blue or pink, and she’d wear gold lipstick. Everybody loved her. I guess being opposites, we were intrigued by each other.”

“I used to say to myself, [James is] sitting over there, all quiet, not saying anything,” Denton says with a smirk. “Who is she?”

The dynamic duo became fast friends and ended up working at the same Sears in College Point, Queens. Like the lunchroom, the department store also offered ample opportunities to goof off. When they weren’t using store phones to gossip with one another, they were hanging out with fellow employees Martin Lawrence (of “Martin” and “Bad Boys” fame) and Kid N’ Play (of “House Party” fame). Hurby Azor, James’ boyfriend at the time, also worked at the store.

It was a time before any of them had realized their dreams of fame, before all of them would become millionaire hip-hop entertainers, producers and comedians in the years that followed. Things just kind of happened that way.

Azor came up with the idea for Salt-N-Pepa as a rap group, something that he wanted to put together to record a song for a project he needed for a class credit at Manhattan’s Center of Media Arts. He had written a song called “The Showstoppa,” a response to the most popular rap single of the time, Doug E. Fresh’s “The Show,” which is now regarded as a classic. The group was going to feature Azor and James, and at one point, his friend Martin Lawrence was a contender, but he had no talent for rapping. James and Denton had it all--the sex appeal, the tight choreography and the potent rhyme delivery. It was perfect.

The women performed Azor’s lyrics, and every dictate, and the class project ended up becoming a hot record that garnered radio play on Marley Marl and Mr. Magic’s radio shows on the popular New York R&B; station WBLS. By October 1985, they performed a show at the Fever, the legendary South Bronx club where hip-hop careers were launched or broken.

“We rocked that show!” Denton says, her eyes lighting up at the memory.

“Remember those days?” James says with equal enthusiasm. “We had our white satin jackets with our names on them, and nameplate belt buckles. We were it.”

They never looked back.

They went into the studio to record “Hot Cool and Vicious,” releasing the single “Tramp.” The song solidified their New York base, but when deejays around the country discovered their suggestive and incredibly catchy B-side, “Push It,” the album leapt up the charts, going platinum. That trend continued with 1988’s “A Salt With a Deadly Pepa,” 1990’s “Blacks’ Magic” and 1993’s “Very Necessary,” which spawned the platinum singles “Shoop” and their Grammy-winning “None of Your Business.” Roper, who was still in high school when she joined the group in 1987, filled the role vacated by the original Spinderella, Pamela Greene, when she quit to get married.

Salt-N-Pepa are rare in that they are one of the few rap acts from the “old school” who have been able to maintain their success throughout the years. “Showstoppa” didn’t prove as seminal a single as “The Show,” but the group has long outlasted Doug E. Fresh. Their songs are danceable, sometimes sexual, sometimes political, but always marketable.

That’s kept the group alive, during good times and bad, through changes in management, the breakups of relationships and internal tension about issues of song content, financial terms and control that have ended so many careers.

“Salt-N-Pepa have a lot of faith in Salt-N-Pepa,” James says. “If we listened to what everyone else said, we wouldn’t be here right now. As far as everyone was concerned, we were a one-record group from Day One. And each album was our last--’Gotta be their last.’ [But] our empowerment comes from within.”

All bringing them to a “Brand New” state of being. The brand-new part is that this is the first album they’ve written completely by themselves, from the music to the lyrics.

“This album was painful in that it was the first without Hurby, but it was also liberating. We got to expand our horizons and give people a taste of who we really are,” explains James with enthusiasm.

“This is us, totally without the influence of a man writing for us. It’s Salt-N-Pepa celebrating their sexuality and their motherhood, and their femininity, every aspect of us and our outlook on life as a whole. People had the perception that without Hurby we couldn’t get the record done--and that energy got us through it.”

Why was control so important?

“We’ve been fighting the perception [that] we don’t know what we’re doing for years,” James says. “We’re females, we’re black, we’re from the ghetto, what do we know about the music business?”

“We’ve been doing this for 10 straight years. Sex is not all that we’re about,” she says finally, addressing the success of their racier material and sexy, glamorous looks. “We’re so many things. We’re mothers, businesswomen, we’re politically active, we’re concerned about world issues. So don’t let sex be the only thing you think we’re about--we are too many things.”