Whether it’s rapping, selling drugs, flipping burgers, or filing TPS reports, success in this world is all about faking it until you make it. And for Philly MC Eve, the path to the top of the music industry was paved with at least one white lie. In this case, she painted herself as a plugged in weed connect to impress Dr. Dre.

Before she was a Ruff Ryder blowing minds with Gwen Stephani, Eve was an underground rapper looking for her big break in the City of Brotherly Love. So when an associate of Dr. Dre’s showed up in town and asked about a greenery connect, Eve and her crew decided to play pretend plug and turn the deal into a makeshift audition.

“My managers at the time were the local drug dealers,” Eve told Brett Berish on a new episode of the “Self Made Tastes Better” video podcast. “And they called me and said, ‘Yo, we got [Dre’s] right-hand man coming in town… You’re gonna act like you’re the weed girl because he wants some weed.’ ”

Of course, as anyone who’s ever been a part of a weed deal knows, there are rarely spontaneous musical numbers in between weighing and payment, and Eve had plenty of doubts about whether the plan would actually work. 

“What the hell am I going to do when I got no weed?” she remembers asking her associates. “They said, ‘[We’ll] just put some music on, and you start rapping.’ So we got to this house… I stood up, they put a tape in, and I started rapping. And the guy was like, ‘What the f uck… Where’s the weed?’ ”