Pop Music : Not Just One of the Guys : As she showed with the Ruff Ryders, Eve can hold her own with the big boys. But now the rapper’s got something else to prove as a solo artist.

“It’s real messy in here,” says Eve Jihan Jeffers as she makes her way into her small midtown Manhattan hotel room. The damage is relatively controlled--the bed is not made, the bathroom has seen Jeffers through a few makeup changes, and there’s a bag of clothes playing peekaboo behind an open closet door.

It’s all excusable. Two days ago, Eve--as she bills herself on record--was in the Bahamas hosting MTV’s “Jams Countdown.” The night before, she was performing at the Apollo Theatre with her hip-hop clique, Ruff Ryders, and she’s spent most of this morning gazing into a photographer’s lens at the hotel room, which has been booked for the Harlem resident’s day of interviews and photo sessions.

These demands on her time have come on the strength of one single, the bouncy, infectious “What Ya Want,” in which Eve describes herself as “every thug’s dream wife.” The track, from the Ruff Ryders’ chart-topping debut, “Ruff Ryders--Ryde or Die Volume One,” reached No. 1 on the Billboard rap singles chart.

“At first I wasn’t sure if people were going to take to it ‘cause it’s a different kind of song,” says Eve, flopping onto the bed.

The track introduced a new aesthetic into the hip-hop world--the idea of a female rapper with understated sex appeal and formidable lyrical skill. Not since Salt-N-Pepa’s arrival in the late ‘80s, in fact, has a female emcee been so fierce yet inviting, sexy but not coquettish. Eve comes across as not just the rapper that guys want to take home, but also the one they want to take home to meet mom and their boys.

“A lot of people see her as a great talent, a great female rapper,” says Steve Stoute, president of black music at Interscope Records, which distributes Ruff Ryder Records, the new label started by the management company that handles such rap stars as DMX.

“I see her as a great emcee, period, without the whole female thing. She can rap about the streets without focusing on her body parts or money she’s taking from a guy. She’s officially hanging with the best guys in the game. She’s a leader.”

Eve has mixed feelings about that distinction. “It’s fun sometimes and annoying at other times. I’m one of the guys, but then I’m not. [When they’re on tour] I don’t sit with them in their hotel room and talk about groupies. After the shows, I go to my room. No after [-concert] parties, no nothing.”

Coming off the Ruff Ryders’ compilation album, where she stood lyric for lyric against such rap heavyweights as DMX, Jay-Z and the LOX, Eve is preparing to release her solo debut, “Let There Be Eve” on Sept. 14.

“Eve will make females be judged as real rappers that can speak on different topics,” says Stoute. “That’s something that a female hasn’t brought to the rap game in a while.”

In the album, which should enjoy hefty first-week sales, the 20-year-old rapper tackles such subjects as domestic abuse, heartbreak and thug-core girl power.

“This is a girl’s album,” says Eve. “Guys are gonna hate me after this album. Most of the songs are about guys and what we go through with them. Me and Missy [Elliott] have this funny song, ‘Ain’t Got No Dough,’ and we’re just talking about fake hustlers who make believe they have money when they know they’re broke.”

“Gotta Man,” a track from the album that is generating lots of attention in hip-hop radio and club circles, is an ode to fidelity backed by a nursery-rhyme hook. But she also confronts DMX and underground stalwarts such as Beanie Sigel and Drag-On in furious rhyme battles.

“With a lot of females, it’s not that they have wack beats, it’s just that the beats don’t fit them,” says Ruff Ryders producer Swizz Beatz, who constructed most of the tracks for “Let There Be Eve.” Swizz’s signature sound--highly dramatic with funky keyboard riffs--is tailored for boisterous types. He had to modify his approach for Eve.

“I gotta make everything fit her like a shoe. I use less action so that the sound doesn’t smother her,” he says.

“I’m not just a hip-hop person,” says Eve, as she pops the new album from former SWV member Coko into her CD player. “I love music. I listen to opera, rock, alternative, R&B;, reggae, soul. Even now, I would rather listen to R&B; than rap.”

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Eve, an only child until her remarried mother gave birth to a son five years ago, grew up in Philadelphia. Her father was in and out of her life until she was about 12, when he left permanently.

Though she spent some weekends and summers with her father in North Carolina, it was her mom who influenced and shaped her.

“I never looked up to any stars or anything when I was young,” she says. “My mother was who I looked up to, because she was a strong, young black woman taking care of her business and her family.”

Listening to her mother sing and hum around the house as she did her chores was Eve’s introduction to music. “Music was just in me when I was little,” she recalls. “I still sing all the time, but I wouldn’t try to do it on a track,” she adds with a laugh.

When she was young, she studied violin for two years and ballet for about three years and took piano lessons briefly--she had to stop because there was no piano at home to practice on. Her mother was a runway model in local fashion shows, so Eve modeled as a child and aspired to be a makeup artist.

As early as third grade, Eve was winning school awards for her short stories, plays and poems.

“I had a real good imagination,” she says. But things went downhill when she started cutting class. “I could have done way, way, way better. I always hated school. I always felt like it was a bother. I always felt like I should be doing something else--nothing else, really, but that’s how I felt.”

In her early teens she was part of a vocal quintet that sang tunes by hit groups En Vogue and Color Me Badd. When the kid-rap group Another Bad Creation became a hit in 1991, her group’s manager suggested they follow suit and start rapping.

Adopting the name Eve of Destruction and reduced to a duo, the act went from battling other emcees in the school cafeteria to “stomping all over” Philly’s talent show scene and serving as opening act on local rap concerts--all before the prominence of the female emcee.

“Now, it’s more like rapping is the thing,” Eve observes. “Before, when I was in high school, it really wasn’t big--especially for girls to be rapping. “

After graduating, she decided to pursue a rap career. “I said if I wasn’t signed [to a recording contract] by the time I’m 20, I’m going to college,” she says.

She never had to enroll.

Eve’s ascent began two years ago when friends Mark Byers and Saddiq, who now serve as her managers, hooked up with the president of producer Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Records and arranged for an impromptu audition in Philadelphia. After only a few bars, the executive cut the audition short. Within a week, she was in L.A. with Dre.

Eve cut “Eve of Destruction” with Dre for the “Bulworth” soundtrack, but the relationship was short-lived. Dre was still overseeing the growth of his fledgling label and Eve came back home after eight months.

“[Aftermath] wasn’t ready for me at the time,” she says. “I think Aftermath was taking on too many projects and didn’t know what direction they want to take those projects in. I’m happy that they weren’t ready because I wasn’t ready to come out.”

While still in L.A., Eve forged a bond with a rising star named DMX, whom she met while he was in town promoting his debut album. When she moved back East, she auditioned for his Ruff Ryders--and was accepted into the fold.

On the brink of a new phase in her career, she takes a pragmatic view of the whole experience.

“I know more about Eve,” she says. “I was 19 when I moved out [to L.A.]. Not that a year makes any difference, but just being through that process of being dropped from a label and being signed to another label and moving from the West Coast back to the East Coast.

“I learned more about the type of music I wanted to make and the type of person I am. That’s why I’m just Eve. I feel now that what you see is what you get, and Eve of Destruction was just a character name that I had to make up, and I’m not about that.” *