Salt N Pepa on Fights, Reunions, and the Future

S
andra “Pepa” Denton had just removed her shoes and settled into the massage chair at the She Thing salon in Queens for what she hoped would be a relaxing pedicure when her cellphone started to buzz. Glancing down at the screen, she saw that it was a call from her musical partner, the person with whom she reclaimed hip-hop for women, scored international hits with songs like “Push It,” “Shoop,” and “Whatta Man,” and toured the world: Cheryl “Salt” James.

She answered with a friendly greeting, having no idea she was about to get some devastating news. 

“She said, ‘I don’t want to be attached to your hips anymore,’” Denton recalls to Rolling Stone, still dumbfounded all these years later. “I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’”

And with that brief phone call, sometime in 2000, Salt-N-Pepa, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop history, were no more.

In hindsight, the split wasn’t hard to see coming. A few years earlier, in a 1997 Rolling Stone cover story, James made it clear that she was no longer interested in recording typical Salt-N-Pepa material. “I don’t want to do any more ‘Shoops.’ I told Pep that if you can respect me just wanting to do inspirational and original music, then I would do another album,” she said.

With those terms agreed upon, Salt-N-Pepa released their 1997 album, Brand New. It didn’t go well. Lead single “R U Ready” bombed and, after peaking at Number 37, the album dropped off the charts. “There was no promotion, no money put behind it, nothing,” James tells Rolling Stone. “It was like the worst drop-the-ball on a Salt-N-Pepa album possible.”

When it came time to tour, the group, accustomed to arenas and big rooms, was back in clubs for the first time since their early days. “Cheryl couldn’t handle it,” Denton says. “It shook her because that album was her baby, it was hers. Mentally, I saw something just leave in that moment. And it really put a damper on us, our relationship.”

Neither woman, not to mention Salt-N-Pepa’s often overlooked DJ, Deidra “Spinderella” Roper, thought the group would ever recover. There was just too many fires still smoldering, too many conflicts left unresolved, from bad business deals to the seemingly simple question of if Salt-N-Pepa are a duo or a trio (turns out, it depends on who you ask).

But more than 20 years later, on the evening of Nov. 8, 2025, all three women once again found themselves on the same stage, for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Los Angeles. After decades of being ignored by the Hall of Fame — despite their massive influence, a string of era-defining hits, and even a pop-culture meme thanks to Patrick Stewart’s dramatic Saturday Night Live introduction of the group — Salt-N-Pepa were finally entering the hallowed institution.

“When they came up in the game, female rappers had to step up to the mic and show that they could go toe to toe with the guys,” Missy Elliott told the crowd during her speech inducting the group. “Salt-N-Pepa and Spinderella did it effortlessly, seamlessly … These three women are the brick layers to the foundation that holds hip-hop together.”

Despite the seemingly united front at the Hall of Fame, however, drama simmered in the group. A sizable portion of it was due to the band’s protracted legal battle with Universal Records over ownership of their masters, which resulted in the removal of much of their catalog from streaming services. To this day, some of Salt-N-Pepa’s most indelible hits, like “Let’s Talk About Sex” and the original recording of “Push It,” are unavailable to stream.

When it came time to give their speeches, James spoke frankly about the issues facing the group: “We are in a fight right now for our masters. After 40 years, as we celebrate this, kids can’t even stream our music. It’s been taken off all streaming platforms because the industry still doesn’t want to play fair.” As the house filled with cries of support, James leaned into the mic and said, “Salt-N-Pepa has never been afraid of a fight.”

A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME ceremony, a much more relaxed James is chilling by a new swimming pool at her home in L.A. It’s an incredibly busy time as she preps for the induction and communicates with her legal team, but she’s taking some time to look back at the journey that brought her to the Hall of Fame. It started in the very early Eighties, when James and Denton were still attending grade school in New York City, years before they actually met.

“I lived across the street from Bushwick High School in Brooklyn,” she says. “I’d watch the B-Boys throw their cardboard down [to breakdance] near a DJ with an MC on the mic. I just remember being enamored, fascinated, hooked. You couldn’t keep me out of a park jam. My mom used to come get me out of the park. The DJ used to say, ‘Cheryl James, your mom is here.’”

Meanwhile, about 10 miles away in Jamaica, Queens, a teenage Denton was having very similar experiences. “I remember people setting up these turntables in the park and hooking them up to the electricity from the streetlights,” she says. “It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen, people rapping to these old-school beats.”

It was the birth of one of the most important musical movements of the 20th century, and it happened to take place practically in their backyards. But even though James and Denton found it intoxicating, their similarities largely stopped there. The Jamaican-born Denton was an extreme extrovert who lived to party with her friends, while James was a quiet introvert without any hint of a wild streak. Anyone who met them back then wouldn’t have imagined them spending even a few minutes together, let alone forming a lifelong bond.

But fate placed them in the lunchroom of Queensborough Community College in 1985. “Cheryl stood out to me because she was quiet,” says Denton. “Everyone was like, ‘Sandy! Sandy!’ And here was this quiet girl in the corner, not calling me, not saying anything. I remember one day I asked her to play [the card game] spades. She said, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘Ooohkay.’”

James was working as a telephone solicitor at Sears Roebuck to pay her tuition. For every Sears application she got someone to submit, she received one dollar. “Instead of being in class, I was walking around the lunchroom asking people if they wanted to fill out these applications,” she says. “Pep saw me coming with the papers, and she was like, ‘I need a job.’ I said, ‘Come to Sears. They’ll hire anybody.’ And they did.”

Denton still marvels at the memory. “It’s very spiritual,” she says. “I know God’s hand was on it. She didn’t hand out those forms to everyone.”

They picked cubicles at the Sears call center right next to each other and formed an unlikely friendship. “I would live vicariously through Pep,” says James. “She had the wildest stories.”

Also working in the cubicle rows at Sears was a budding comedian named Martin Lawrence and an aspiring music producer named Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor, who dated James. Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin, two ambitious rappers who’d become Kid ‘N Play, had jobs there too, making the call center a wellspring for some of the most commercial hip-hop of the era. But at the moment, everyone was just trying to keep their sales jobs.

James, however, hadn’t thought of a career in music or show business; she was intent on becoming a nurse. But Azor encouraged her to get behind the mic. Impressed by what he saw, he set out to create a rap duo that he could manage and produce, a sort of female Run-D.M.C.

Two acquaintances of James, one girl with a squeaky voice, another deemed too proper, didn’t work out. Then Pepa got on the mic. “Our voices just were magic together,” James says. “We were meant to make music.”

Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s braggadocios “The Show” had just come out, and Azor wrote a diss track in response called “The Showstopper,” which Denton and James recorded in Azor’s basement utilizing just a mic, turntables, and a tape recorder. He called his new rap duo “Super Nature.”

It all seemed little more than a lark until one day Denton took James for a ride in her Datsun 210 and “The Showstopper” came on the radio. “We were like, ‘Is this real?’” Denton recalls. “I couldn’t do nothing but slam the brakes, throw the car in park, and jump out. Cheryl was screaming, ‘Get in the car!’ But I jumped out, screaming on the boulevard, ‘That’s me on the radio!’”

To capitalize on the buzz, Azor changed the group’s name to Salt-N-Pepa from a line in “The Showstopper” (“I’m gonna show you how it’s supposed to be/Cuz we the Salt and Pepa MCs”), started booking local shows — where Lawrence often kicked off the evening with a comedy set — and made arrangements for the group to record its debut LP, Hot, Cool & Vicious.

They cut the album at a makeshift studio in a Brooklyn brownstone owned by Fresh Gordon of the Choice MC’s. Azor wrote and produced most of the songs, but it was Gordon who came up with an infectious synth part that became the basis for Salt-N-Pepa’s breakthrough song, “Push It.” At first, they thought it was too poppy and played into the chief criticism of the group at the time.

“People thought we were pop because we were popular,” Denton says, “and crossover wasn’t really a thing back then.” But Azor brushed aside their concerns and pushed them into a bathroom to record their vocals.

The song was originally the B side to their single “Tramp,” but DJs were drawn to “Push It.” It took time and a lot of touring, with Salt-N-Pepa sharing bills with artists like DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, but “Push It” crawled up the Hot 100. In February 1988, it landed at Number 19, not far from Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere,” INXS’ “Need You Tonight,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love.”

Salt-N-Pepa were now part of the pop mainstream, but early hip-hop acts like Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and the Fat Boys all had brief moments near the top of the pop charts too before imploding. To many in the industry, hip-hop was still a passing fad, and labels devoted far more resources to white acts.

But Salt-N-Pepa kept their momentum going with 1988’s A Salt With a Deadly Pepa — which spawned the hit “Shake Your Thang” — and hit another gear in 1990 with Blacks’ Magic and the smash “Let’s Talk About Sex.” “That song caused a lot of controversy and got a lot of parents upset,” says James. “This man said to us one time, ‘I was really down with you girls, but basically now you’re making this smutty music.’ And I’m like, ‘Did you listen to the song?’ We weren’t promoting. We were saying we wanted to talk about it.”

They felt vindicated when ABC News anchor Peter Jennings heard the song and invited them to rerecord it as “Let’s Talk About AIDS” as part of an AIDS awareness campaign. “A lot of organizations embraced us because we were brave enough to talk about something, HIV, that nobody wanted to talk about,” James says.

In 1993, when many rap act of the Eighties were being cast aside by the harder sounds of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and gangsta rap, Salt-N-Pepa sold 5 million copies of their fourth album, Very Necessary, on the strength of hits like “Shoop,” “None of Your Business,” and the collaboration with En Vogue, “Whatta Man.”

The success placed them onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards alongside the Rolling Stones and Springsteen, won them their first Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group, and took them on tour all across the planet. “We went to Japan, Russia, and performed for kings and the even the Sultan of Brunei,” says Denton. “We went to places most rappers don’t even know about.”

They also generated millions of dollars — but much of it didn’t go to them. The group chalks it up to bad deals it had signed and Azor’s role as manager, producer, and primary songwriter. “When you’re young and you’re an artist, especially in this genre of music, you get taken advantage of left and right,” says James. “You want to create, you want to make music, and you don’t want to deal with business, which is a huge downfall for most artists … But we were in all these obscure European cities, and we’re platinum here and we’re gold there, and they’re giving us plaques and they’re having big dinners.”

At one such party, they were presented with individual Cartier watches. “It was a $12,000 watch,” James says. “I was like, ‘Holy cow, we must really be making them some good money.’ But I’m still living at my mother’s house.”

Complicating matters was Salt’s relationship with Azor. “Before all of this started, Hurby was just a regular guy, I was a regular girl, and we were in puppy love,” James says. “But now he’s a big deal, I’m an artist under his production company, and all these other ladies started showing up. It’s the old story that a lot of women in music go through. I don’t recommend anyone dating their producer or their manager, ever.”

Making the situation even worse, Denton and Azor had their own issues. “She almost beat him up in a van one time,” says James. “I had to stop her. I was like, ‘Listen, once you beat my boyfriend up, where do we go from there?’”

Denton sighs when all this comes up. “It’s not good for a group when someone is involved with the manager, the owner,” she says. “It means that somebody’s going to be left out. And sometimes it’s not fair to the other member because they get caught in the crossfire. I tried to tell her that staying involved with Hurby wasn’t a good idea. And her words were like, ‘Don’t tell me who I can date and who I cannot date.’”

James eventually realized she was in an unhealthy relationship and split from Azor while maintaining business and creative ties. Later, she decided to make a complete break following the Very Necessary tour, sparking a costly legal battle with Azor (they eventually settled with their former manager). When the dust settled, several years had passed, and the group signed with a new label, London Records.

The vision was a fresh start for Salt-N-Pepa where they’d finally control their creative destiny. They titled the album Brand New, but its disappointing performance, among other issues, led to that earth-shattering phone call from James to Denton at the salon.

SALT-N-PEPA’S SPLIT WAS DEVASTATING FOR DENTON, but it also had a huge impact on a third member of the group who has spent the past 40 years straddling a very blurry and uncomfortable line between hired hand and full member: Deidra “Spinderella” Roper. Telling her story requires us to rewind the clock back to the earliest days of the group when Azor brought in another DJ, Latoya Hanson, to serve as the original Spinderella. Hanson stuck around long enough to appear on the cover of the first album but left before it took off. “We weren’t vibing for the most part, but she also got married and she said she didn’t want to do it anymore,” says James. “I don’t know what story she’s telling, but she basically quit.” 

Hanson has lived a quiet life over the years, but she did vent some old frustrations to TMZ in August 2025 when Salt-N-Pepa were inducted into the Hall of Fame and she was excluded. “What caused the split was a lot of internal, personal, female, catty jealously,” she said. “It’s the same thing as the Supremes … And Spinderella is my name. They took my name. Hurby may have given that name to Deidra, but he took it from me.”

Whatever the truth, Hurby was looking for a new DJ in 1987. Word got back to Roper, still in high school at the time. “I had picked up some techniques from my boyfriend,” she says. “He taught me backspinning, he taught me the breaks on the records. And I so phoned up Hurby and was like, ‘Wait a minute. Salt-N-Pepa? The one that be on the radio, Salt-N-Pepa?’”

Denton joined just in time to be in the “Push It” video, enraging her predecessor. “I was hot [when I first saw it],” Hanson told TMZ. “I already knew it was coming, but I was hot. I was on fire.”

Roper, meanwhile, felt ostracized by her bandmates. “There was a lot of distance between us at first because I’m younger,” she says. “They would sit together, and they’d be laughing and kicking, and I would be by myself. I made friends with everybody else on the bus until they eventually warmed up to me.”

When Roper saw the tensions flare up with Azor, she kept her head down. “I minded my business,” she says. “My responsibility was to take care of what I’m supposed to take care of. Deal with this music, drop my cues, do these shows, be on time. I noticed the internal turmoil, but in the beginning I was just bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, trying to figure it all out.”

The group rewarded her loyalty by featuring her on every album cover after she joined, posing with her on the cover of Rolling Stone, and presenting themselves as a trio most everywhere they went in public. “We didn’t want to be like other artists who didn’t highlight their DJ,” says James. “And so we made a conscious choice to bring her from behind the turntables, put her in the front, even give her a verse on a song or two, and really celebrate her. It gave the appearance of an equal trio because of the way we presented it.”

Often, it was just that, an “appearance.” “Pep and I were friends, and we were partners for years before she came in,” says James of Roper. “We had a whole career and another DJ. In me and Pep’s mind, the partnership had always been Salt-N-Pepa, but I get that some people felt like it was a trio.”

At least in the public eye, things were harmonious within Salt-N-Pepa — but then Salt disbanded the group. At that point, all three women had to find their own way after years as a unit. Roper began hosting a radio show in L.A., James focused on her young family and solo music, and Denton did whatever she could to keep her name out there, including a role on VH1’s Surreal Life where she shared a house with Jose Canseco and Omarosa Manigault. She also did a stint on The Surreal Life: The Fame Games, where she made it nearly to the end of the competition but was outmaneuvered by disgraced porn star Ron Jeremy and Baywatch actress Traci Bingham. “The only thing I regret is getting into other businesses I have no business being in,” she says with a laugh, “like real estate.” (She also wrote a memoir, Let’s Talk About Pep, where she detailed past relationships and her difficult marriage to Naughty By Nature rapper Antony “Treach” Criss.)

The only thing Denton didn’t consider was making solo music. “To this day, I have never made a song without Salt besides one guest spot on a Missy Elliott album,” she says. “If it ain’t Salt-N-Pepa, it ain’t nothing for me.”

After about five years of inactivity, James started to feel differently about working with Denton again, especially after they were approached by VH1 about starring in a reality show where they could air out their differences. “We worked through some of our issues and even went through therapy together,” James says. “It was very emotional.”

The show also gave Roper a chance to finally explain why she viewed herself as unequal. “’Do you consider me the ‘N’ in Salt-N-Pepa?’” she asked her group mates during a tense sit-down caught on camera. They both told her they did not. “I always see you as icing on the cake,” James responded. “Me and Sandy can still do a show, even if you don’t show up.”

The women agreed to disagree but soldiered on as a trio for a few years, headlining throwback tours like I Love the 90s, where they shared the stage with Coolio and Vanilla Ice. But in 2019, when Salt-N-Pepa agreed to an arena package tour with New Kids on the Block, En Vogue, and Rick Astley, Spinderella wasn’t invited. All signs point to a dispute over money.

“Despite my participation in promoting the tour and being highly publicized as one of the acts, in January 2019 I received a ‘termination’ email,” Roper wrote to fans on Instagram. “I refuse to participate in misleading fans, ticketholders, and others who — based on all the advertising — were anticipating seeing the iconic #SaltnPepa and #Spinderella trio.”

Later that year, Roper sued them over unpaid royalties, trademark infringement, fraud, and breach of contract. A judge threw out the case and sent them into mediation. “Spin and her legal team adopted a scorched earth approach that brought unnecessary attention to a business dispute,” James and Denton said in a group statement, “that all along could have, and should have, been settled amicably and privately.” 

It was the kind of nasty public battle that could have caused a permanent schism. And for a few years that seemed like the outcome as Salt-N-Pepa continued to perform only as a duo. But in October 2024, Pepa appeared onstage at Spinderella’s Halloween Boo Bash and ran through “Push It,” “Shoop,” and “Whatta Man.” 

“A lot of people play divide-and-conquer in this business, and they get in people’s heads and stop them from talking,” says Denton. “I finally got a chance to say, ‘Let me talk to Spin.’ I knew people was in her head. I wanted to say, ‘They lied to you and made you believe that you were getting this when we weren’t getting that.’ But it took me three and a half years to get Spin to say ‘I love you’ back to me. But she said, ‘I do, Pep. I really do.’”

For James, her healing started when she too decided to show up unannounced at one of Spinderella’s solo events in L.A. “She apologized for her part and any hurt that I felt,” Roper says. “I was like, ‘We’re not kids anymore. Too much time has passed to be in involved with each other to allow all the noise that’s out there come in.’”

Adds James: “We’ve had some difficult conversations one-on-one, her and I, and we are in a way better space.”

Salt-N-Pepa have made several appearances as a trio recently, and everyone says they’re ready to put the turmoil behind them. “It’s giving me chills now because it was such a fight, and it was unnecessary,” says Roper. “I never want to fight with who I call my sisters.”

Much of this played out in private, but the public knew the broad strokes thanks to legal filings and press coverage. What few people knew is that before the trio finally made peace, the duo of James and Denton fractured one more time. “Salt quit me again,” says Denton with a laugh. “She called in August 2023 and once again said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, I’m tired.’ I sat there and thought, ‘Why shouldn’t I be able to perform songs that I wrote and produced?’”

Despite being uncertain if fans would accept Pepa on her own, Denton told her agent at CAA to look for promoters willing to book her. To her surprise, there was interest. “It was so empowering,” she says. “The audience didn’t question me. They didn’t go, ‘Where’s Salt?’ The way people received me was just magical.”

After about two years of singing “Shoop” and “Push It” alone for the first time in her life, word came back to Denton that James was ready to return to the fold. “I just wanted to stop traveling,” James explains. “I needed a break.”

The timing was fortuitous. The group members soon learned that they were making it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It also allowed them to stand united as they battled Universal over ownership of their master recordings. “The law gives us the right when 35 years has passed to get the music copyrights back that we created,” says Denton, “and end the original contracts that we signed at the very beginning of our careers when we had no bargaining power.”

A judge recently ruled against them, and they’re planning an appeal. But even if they don’t win, they hope the effort inspires other artists to fight for their rights. “Just because we ran into a little hiccup, that doesn’t mean we still don’t want to enlighten and encourage other artists to look at your paperwork, see where you at 35 years in the game,” Denton says. “They think we shouldn’t talk about it anymore, and they’re just going to shut us down. Yeah, you can shut us down in the courts, but you can’t shut our mouths down.”

These days, Salt-N-Pepa and Spinderella seem to enjoy standing on steady ground. They’re looking ahead to a busy slate of shows in 2026 and beyond, and, according to James, there’s a possibility they’ll open for Janet Jackson.

“We’re very open to doing shows with Janet,” Denton adds. “And there’s been talk of shows with TLC, which would be great because people always pitted us against each other, because we were one three-female group and they were the next one.”

Does that mean James and Denton now definitely see the group as a trio? “We’re a duo/trio,” James shoots back. “That’s what we need to start saying in our bio.”

After all these years, Roper says she’s at peace with that. “Maybe we can make hats that say ‘duo’ and ‘trio,’” she says with a laugh. “We can look at them and go, ‘What is it today? Oh, it’s a trio.’”

There’s even discussions about a new album, their first since the Brand New debacle nearly 30 years ago. This time around, they’re willing to let Hurby play a role in it too. Despite everything that happened in the Nineties, they’ve patched up their relationship and Hurby even appeared with them at the Hall of Fame. “Listen, never say never,” says James. “A new album would be a great way to wrap up a great career, put a pink bow on it.”

James also has a new solo song called “Chosen” that she’s eager to share with fans. “‘Chosen’ is a celebration of the Chosen Ones, the ones that were there in the beginning that laid the foundation and the groundwork for hip-hop,” she says. “Gen Z and Gen X are starving for some grown-folks hip-hop.”

“I used to say, I don’t want to be rapping onstage, doing ‘Push It’ in my fifties,” she adds. “And here I am, almost 60. But Pep always said, ‘It doesn’t matter how old you are.’ And you know what? She was right.”