What Has Lil Mama Been Up To?

If you used to wear lipgloss, it was probably poppin' and it was probably cool. And you probably owe that to Lil Mama, who owes her own lip gloss confidence to Mac and L'Oréal — yep, 'cause she's worth it. I could go on and quote the entire song to you, but I'm sure you know all the lyrics. Well, Lil Mama is back with a new song, "Sausage," and it's pretty damn great. It's about safe sex, Yale, and breakfast (and possibly a shoutout to the "Sausage Movement"), in a nutshell, but you'll just have to listen and watch the video for yourself. The fact that she has a new song raises a very important question: where the hell has Lil Mama been?

Twitter has been VERY responsive to Lil Mama's new song both negatively and positively, but one thing's clear: a lot of people have missed Mama. "Sausage" is her first video since "Lip Gloss" which premiered in 2008, from her first and only full-length album to date, Voice Of The Young People. "Sausage" is supposedly a single from her next album, with a title that has yet to be announced. Hey, I get it. Even Justin Timberlake took seven years between Future Sex/Love Sounds and The 20/20 Experience.

A lot of Lil Mama's time was tied up from 2008 until now. She was one of the first judges of literally the best show on earth, America's Best Dance Crew. As much as I love watching Robert Herjavec from Shark Tank swing-dance like a goon on Dancing With the Stars, nothing can beat the Jabbawockeez.

Besides judging breakdancing (which makes for the greatest resume line ever), Lil Mama also tried her hand at acting. In a role a hundred girls would kill for, she played the late, great Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes in the TLC biopic, CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story, which aired in 2013 on VH1. Lil Mama really nailed it when it came to the rapper's look — her resemblance to Left Eye was uncanny.

Other than that, there was that strange, perhaps forgotten, incident at the 2009 MTV Music Awards when Lil Mama hopped up on stage when Jay Z and Alicia Keys were performing "Empire State Of Mind." (Oh god, it's stuck in your head now, isn't it?) Sadly, though, for Lil Mama, Jay Z snubbed her and didn't even acknowledge her existence even when she struck a b-boy pose. I'm not sure how I would react were Jay Z to basically call me a worthless ghost. You're crazy for this one, Jay. But sweet Lil Mama realized later when she was watching the footage from the event that Jay Z "wasn't feeling it" and proceeded to apologize profusely, saying she never meant any disrespect, which honestly, is a classy baller move.

Besides that, the rapper has been busy serving selfie game on her Instagram. I don't know when her next album will drop, or what it will be called, but "Sausage" is a good sign that it's coming soon. And! If you didn't know, "Sausage" is a shoutout to the "sausage movement," which is a dedicated rap movement about bacon, eggs and grits.