FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Demarchelier for The New York Times
Part Forty-Four: Nicki Minaj
___________
THIS is a slight departure…
PHOTO CREDIT: Dennis Leupold for Wonderland.
from my usual Modern Heroine features. I normally include female artists who might be quite new but are showing signs that they are icons and hugely inspirational figures of the future. Nicki Minja’s debut album, Pink Friday, came out in 2010; she started recording music quite a way before then. Her fourth studio album, Queen, was released in 2018. There are going to be a lot of people excited to se if Minaj offers up a new album soon (not that there has been an announcement). Despite the fact that she is established and has a legacy already, I think we will see a lot more from Minaj. At thirty-eight, one can argue there are other women at her heels when it comes to the title of ‘Queen of Rap’. That said, I still think she can hold that honour. Despite the fact that there have been some controversies through the years, Minaj’s philanthropy and extraordinary persona have turned into a modern-day heroine who inspires fans and artists alike. I am going to end this feature with a review of Queen – at the very end, I will drop in a career-spanning playlist. Before quoting from two fascinating interviews conducted around the release of Queen – one in 2017, the other in 2018 -, I want to source from Wikipedia. They provide some useful background, in addition to (stating) why Minaj is such a phenomenon:
“Minaj's third and fourth studio albums, The Pinkprint (2014) and Queen (2018), marked a departure from the dance-pop stylings of her previous records and a return to her hip hop roots. The Pinkprint was critically acclaimed, spawning the single "Anaconda", which reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Queen featured "Chun Li", which reached number 10 on the Hot 100. In 2019, Minaj released a collaboration with Karol G, "Tusa", which debuted at number one on the "Hot Latin Songs" chart and went on to become the longest-running number-one single on the Argentina Hot 100, having spent 6 months at number one on the chart.
Her feature on the remix of Doja Cat's "Say So" and her collaboration with 6ix9ine, "Trollz", both released in 2020, marked her first and second number-one singles on the Hot 100, respectively, with the latter making her the second female rapper to debut atop the chart after Lauryn Hill in 1998. Minaj is the first female artist of any genre to reach 100 entries on the Hot 100 chart, and is one of the only two female artists across all genres that have more than 100 Hot 100 entries, with the other artist being Taylor Swift.
Cited as one of the most influential and best selling rap artists of all time, and dubbed as the "Queen of Rap" by several media outlets, Minaj has received numerous accolades throughout her career, including six American Music Awards, twelve BET Awards, four MTV Video Music Awards, four Billboard Music Awards, one ASCAP Latin Music Award, and two Billboard Women in Music Awards. She has also been nominated for 10 Grammy Awards. Minaj was the highest-ranked female rapper on Billboard's list of the top artists of the 2010s. In 2016, Minaj was included on the annual Time list of the 100 most influential people in the world”.
I have got into Minaj’s work more than last few years. Although there have been controversies and feuds through her career, one cannot argue against the fact that Minaj is a sensational artist that will go down in the music history books. I do think, as I said, we will see a lot more from a modern-day leader who, in years to come, will be remembered as an icon. I think that she has helped open doors for so many women in Rap.
I want to move onto Queen and some of the interviews that Minaj conducted around the time. I learned a lot whilst researching. In this Wonderland. interview, we learn about some of the influence behind the title, Queen – in addition to why Minaj is so successful and respected:
“Miss Minaj is still here, a good eight years since she made her major label debut with the now classic Pink Friday, and even longer since she first caught the hip hop world’s attention with her witty and wild words, rapping and pushing mixtapes on the block in her native Queens, New York. She has a new album out called, resolutely, Queen, which bears the weight of that title, a tense, intense collection of songs about life as the commander-in- chief. Throughout the album, she raps of triumph and war, most pointedly on first single, “Chun-Li”, in which she slams those who try to make her out to be a villain, and pounds her chest while calling herself King Kong.
Her target on the album mostly remains nameless, though amongst others, Cardi B is an unavoidable spectre, as she is the only woman since Nicki’s reign began to have come close to her level of success. The previously inferred rivalry came to a head when they crossed paths at a New York Fashion Week gala at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan this September. Grainy video appears to show the two women, both impeccable in full-length ball gowns, with the Bronx-born Cardi trying to fight through a crowd of security and bystanders to get to a calm Nicki, eventually throwing a red high-heeled shoe at her Queens counterpart. Though Nicki was unavailable for comment after the altercation, when we spoke about a week before the chaos, she was coy but cutting. “My truth is I don’t have an issue with any woman in rap. If they have an issue with me they can suck my dick,” Nicki says.
She is the most successful female rapper of all the time, a woman who has achieved things that no other woman (or man, really) in hip hop ever has, an MC who has been able to become as successful on the global stage as any more conventional pop singer. By making pop songs (and singing the hooks for them) as gooey sweet as “Super Bass” while maintaining her New York bona fides with gutter tracks like “Beez in the Trap,” she has changed what it can mean to be a female rapper in the industry. Go to karaoke anywhere from Bangkok to Vienna, and you will hear people rapping to Nicki Minaj like they sing along to Katy Perry. She is the woman with the most entries on Billboard’s Hot 100 charts – ever. “When I was first trying to rap, female rappers weren’t out here getting paid a million dollars a show,” she says.
But though “success” is the theme of Queen, fame has never been the most interesting thing about Nicki Minaj. She’s a writer, a real writer, and at a time in which celebrity itself is honoured as an art, Nicki has always made actual art, with a command of language and metre and metaphor that is thrilling at its best, and, even with all of her accolades, often taken for granted. Born Onika Tanya Maraj in Trinidad and Tobago in 1982, she grew up in hip hop’s home, New York, where her family settled in Southside Jamaica, Queens. She had a tumultuous childhood, with an alcoholic father who burned down their family home at one point, a trauma she detailed on the track “Autobiography” from her 2008 tape, Sucka Free. But she was ambitious, auditioning to be a student at LaGuardia High School in Manhattan, best known as the school that inspired Fame, and a storied dramatic arts centre that has produced stars like Al Pacino and Eartha Kitt. “I majored in drama and theatre. We had all the freedom in the world to do any and everything we wanted,” she says.
She has put everything in our conversation on shaky ground, which is perhaps, for her, like levelling the playing field, since that seems to just be the atmosphere in her world. And the strategy, if something this instinctive can be called a strategy, works, at least on me in this conversation: has Nicki just been misunderstood all this time, a Joan of Arc that we’ve thrown into the bonfire? “I’m not going to change myself. People have to loosen the fuck up,” she says. For good and for bad, Nicki has never been afraid of controversy, sometimes with joyful effect and sometimes not. The night before we speak, she had a wardrobe malfunction which exposed her breasts live on stage, and to me, she admirably shrugs it off by saying, “Everyone has already seen my nipples.” But she can also be truly frustrating, like with her recent duet with New York rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, who pled guilty “to the use of a child in a sexual performance” in 2015 relating to a case involving a girl of 13 years-old. When discussing criticism of their collaboration on Queen Radio, she basically called the allegations fake news: “When I know somebody there’s nothing you can tell me about them.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Dennis Leupold for Wonderland.
Beneath the current chaos, it is wise to remember that there is real pathos in Nicki Minaj – she has proven again and again that she is a sensitive, creative, even vulnerable soul, no matter her current level of outrageousness. I ask her about a moment in 2015, when she read on stage at a benefit concert the famous poem “Still I Rise”, by Maya Angelou, about what it means to be a black woman in the face of all the shit the world dishes out. “Does my sassiness upset you?” Angelou asks in the poem at one point. “I didn’t realise even until I was up there reading it how much it resonated with me personally,” she says. “That poem reminded me that I will always come out on top. When your heart and your passion are in the right place, you come out on top. I know who I am.” She giggles sweetly and says she has a boyfriend now, though she won’t say much about him, just calls him “new boy” and says that pregnancy, something she has long publicly wished for herself, is on the horizon, too. “I’ve got to get married first then I’ll have a child. I might be closer than people think actually,” she trolls again but playfully so. “I love children. I’m not going to put that off for much longer”.
I look at some of the women in Rap and Hip-Hop today – like Cardi B and Bree Runway -, and they definitely owe a nod and debt to a trailblazer of the game. Before wrapping things up by bringing in a review of Queen, there is a 2017 interview from The New York Times that makes for illuminating and interesting reading:
“THROUGHOUT HER CAREER, Minaj has demonstrated a discipline and intelligence that is rare among other pop stars of her generation. She has what she describes to me as “the X-factor, which is just the thing you can’t put into words.” Onika Tanya Maraj was born in Saint James, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1982, and immigrated to Queens, N.Y., with her family at the age of 5. She began her music career singing with various rappers and working odd jobs. When she waitressed, she wrote lyrics constantly on the notepad she used to take orders. There is genuine pleasure in her voice as she reminisces about this. “I would take people’s order and then a rap might come to me just by what they’re wearing or what they said or did, and I would go in the kitchen and write it down, put it in the back of my little thing or my apron, and by the time I was done I would have all of these sheets of paper thrown around everywhere with raps.”
Since then, her career has been a checklist of milestones. In 2009, she was the first woman artist signed to Young Money, the label founded by Lil Wayne. Three mixtapes and three studio albums — “Pink Friday” in 2010, “Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded” in 2012 and “The Pink Print” in 2014 — followed, and in March 2017, Minaj surpassed Aretha Franklin for the most appearances (76) by a woman on the Billboard Hot 100, a record Franklin had held for almost 40 years. She is the rare hip-hop artist who has successfully and sustainably crossed over into pop music. Minaj, M.I.A. and Madonna performed their single, “Give Me All Your Luvin,” at the 2012 Super Bowl. Days later she performed solo at the Grammy Awards. Her dance song “Starships” went platinum six times over. She even collaborated with Ariana Grande on 2016’s song “Side to Side,” and while the pairing was unexpected given Grande’s previously wholesome image, the song went triple platinum. Minaj does not temper her swagger or sexuality. Sometimes, when I am daydreaming, I marvel at the phrases “dick bicycle” and “If you wanna ménage I got a tricycle” from “Side to Side,” which are so damn clever and funny and vulgar but also accurate as hell for a song Grande once described as being “about riding leading to soreness”.
MINAJ’S PUBLIC IMAGE and personas are carefully curated. The tabloids have assiduously tracked her professional and personal lives and I restrain myself from asking about her ex Safaree Samuels, who appears on “Love & Hip Hop,” a reality television series about the music industry, and if she would ever give Drake a shot. (I restrain myself greatly.) I don’t know that anyone but her inner circle knows who Nicki Minaj really is.
This elusiveness is compounded by her fascinating catalog of performative alter egos, including Harajuku Barbie (a fashionista obsessed with pink and Minaj’s longest-running persona), Nicki Teresa (known as “The Healer”) and the sexually explicit Nicki Lewinsky — there is even a male persona, Roman Zolanski, a slightly exaggerated version of Minaj herself. She has a vocal range that can go from a high-pitched twittering to a growl in a few bars. In both music and regular conversation, she enjoys playing with accents, offering up valley girl-speak or island patois. During our time together, she switched to a British accent a couple of times and then effortlessly returned to her normal voice, a slightly affectless cadence that recalls her Queens upbringing. In public, she often wears dramatic makeup, dramatic outfits and a rainbow of dramatic wigs, which is to say she performs both on- and offstage. There is no point during our conversation where Minaj demonstrates anything but absolute self-awareness. She pauses briefly before she answers my questions, as if calculating every possible outcome to everything she says. By the end of the interview, I am impressed by her fierce intelligence.
At this point in her career, Minaj is able to reconcile, somewhat, her struggles. “I kind of love that I’ve had to go through so many hurdles to get where I am because I feel like I deserve it.” She is frank about what she has been up against. “I had so much going against me in the beginning: being black, being a woman, being a female rapper. No matter how many times I get on a track with everyone’s favorite M.C. and hold my own, the culture never seems to want to give me my props as an M.C., as a lyricist, as a writer. I got to prove myself a hundred times, whereas the guys that came in around the same time as I did, they were given the titles so much quicker without anybody second-guessing”.
Just before closing, The Independent were full of praise when reviewing Queen. Despite the fact she collaborates with a few artists on the album, it is her voice and talent that shines the brightest:
“Queen starts off with “Ganja Burns” and the sweet contrast of her singing voice against her cutting bars, flexing lyrical muscles against a tropical beat. She raps: “They done went to witch doctors to bury the Barbie”, a reference to the supposed hate train that is attempting to stall her career. She is even more direct when she raps “Unlike a lot of these hoes whether wack or lit, At least I can say I wrote every rap I spit” - surely a swipe at Cardi B who has been criticised for her reported use of ghostwriters.
“Majesty”, featuring Eminem and Labrinth, fails to live up to the imposing title of the album; Eminem asserts on his super fast verse “Let me keep it one hundred, two things shouldn't be your themes of discussion. The queen and her husband, last thing you're gonna wanna be is our subjects.” On paper, “Majesty” should be a thrilling collaboration but in fact, it is one of the few misses of the album, running for too long and lacking a cohesiveness between its three artists.
Hard as she may be, she still shows fans her vulnerable side: “Bed”, the second single released from the album, sees her team up with pop princess Ariana Grande for a seductive, playful number while “Thought I Knew You” unites her with The Weeknd. The two play the part of warring lovers who trade beautifully harmed accusations against each other. “Run and Hide” possesses an eerie production that plays out as Minaj opens up about her trust issues”.
Even though it has been a few years since Nicki Minaj released Queen into the world, she is still busy in the world and, very soon, I am sure we will hear something in the way of plans and new music. Not only is she the modern Queen of Rap; I feel that, in years to come when we look back on the women who broke boundaries and paved the way in the field, Minaj’s name will come to mind. Even if you are not a massive fan of her work, one has to appreciate all that she has achieved and why so many look up to her. Taking that into consideration, it is hard to overlook such a…
HUGELY important artist.