The Passion of Nicki Minaj
by Vannesa Grigoriadis
The world’s biggest female rap superstar has meticulously crafted
her own image — and maintained it with uncompromising control.
Pop music is dominated almost exclusively by the female star — Beyoncé, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and, as always, Madonna. Engaging in a frantic, complex game — crossing over many genres to keep up with the current caldron of hip-hop, electronic music and R&B; signing sponsorship deals to make up for the lack of album sales; performing live everywhere from sheikhs’ parties to worldwide arenas — these women are the pop business now, and they’re not feeling particularly shy about telling us that. Their primary message has become one of being the woman you actually have to be behind the scenes to succeed today: powerful, outspoken and in control.
Nicki Minaj is the world’s biggest female hip-hop star, a top pop star and the first woman to achieve success in both genres. Like Beyoncé, who performed recently in Central Park with the words ‘‘boss’’ and ‘‘hustler’’ flashing on screens behind her, along with a grainy video in which she smashed a vacuum and a sewing machine, Minaj has become expert at modeling the ways that women can wield power in the industry. But she has also drawn attention to the ways in which power can be embodied by a woman standing up for herself and speaking her own mind. Minaj’s behavior isn’t exclusive to her tracks; she also exhibits it in the national telenovela that she, like the rest of these women, to a greater or lesser degree, is running about herself, feeding the public information about her paramours, ex-paramours, peccadilloes and beefs, all of it delivered in social media’s short, sharp bursts.
Perhaps you recall the three-act revenge drama that played out on various screens last month, as Minaj faced off against two major powers: Swift, the 25-year-old golden girl who may be the richest woman in music, and who spends time wholesomely baking cookies at her TriBeCa spread with a rotating cast of B.F.F.s; and Cyrus, the ex-Disney star who, more than five years ago, was extolling the virtues of purity rings but is now America’s pre-eminent ‘‘bad girl.’’ She first recreated herself as a pornified star who wore gold grilles on her teeth and introduced the mainstream to ‘‘twerking,’’ a dance originating in black circles in the South that involves shaking your buttocks, and more recently rebranded herself a ‘‘happy hippie’’ and ‘‘genderqueer,’’ neither male nor female.
Pop stars today travel around with a small entourage, conducting their business from a mobile phone in the back of a climate-controlled luxury vehicle. And you can imagine these women in their cars when the nominations for MTV’s Video Music Awards, which long ago stopped judging musical quality and moved on to assessing the size of empires, were announced earlier this summer. The list did not include a nod in the top award category for Minaj’s wild video for ‘‘Anaconda,’’ a song that samples Sir Mix-a-Lot’s ‘‘Baby Got Back,’’ from 1992. The video features Minaj flipping the script to be the baby who has back, refusing to let her co-star, Drake, touch her buttocks and, somewhat frighteningly (for men) cutting up a banana that’s a clear metaphor for the snake in their pants.
You can picture Minaj in her Maybach as she considered this particular affront and then used it to make a larger point. ‘‘If I was a different ‘kind’ of artist, ‘Anaconda’ would be nominated,’’ she tweeted, followed by ‘‘If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated,’’ and ‘‘I’m not always confident. Just tired. Black women influence pop culture so much but are rarely rewarded for it.’’ (For the record, Beyoncé was nominated for the award in question, for a video in which she dances around in underwear and, inexplicably, a sweatshirt with the word ‘‘KALE.’’)
Swift, the good girl, herself nominated for a video featuring semiclad, slender women, jumped in next: ‘‘I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot.’’ (She quickly encountered media pushback and called Minaj to apologize.) But the free spirit Cyrus had something to say, too: A few weeks later, in this newspaper, she criticized Minaj’s comments as lacking an ‘‘open heart’’ and ‘‘love,’’ adding that she didn’t respect Minaj’s statement ‘‘because of the anger that came with it,’’ calling it ‘‘not very polite’’ and continuing, ‘‘Nicki Minaj is not too kind.’’
Soon, our characters gathered in the V.M.A. Thunderdome, where things that are not quite true are staged in a crude, middle-school-esque pageant, with players jockeying for time. And indeed, Swift and Minaj, having reached a truce, opened the show together. But later, as Minaj slinked onstage in a revealing dress that closely resembled gold filigree on a china cup to accept her award — for Best Hip-Hop Video, which is not as important as Video of the Year: ‘‘I saw [Cyrus] just looking at me, with her face screwed up, and I thought, What the!’’ she told me in mid-September, in the Trump hotel in Columbus Circle, while visiting New York for Fashion Week. Onstage, Minaj next did something exceedingly rare in the commercial music world. She addressed Cyrus with real venom — ‘‘This bitch that had a lot to say about me the other day in the press’’ — and pointed at her with a manicured finger: ‘‘Miley, what’s good?’’ MTV cut Minaj’s mike, but you could see her lips forming the words, ‘‘Don’t play with me, bitch.’’
A month later, the episode was still bothering Minaj. Addressing Cyrus, she told me: ‘‘The fact that you feel upset about me speaking on something that affects black women makes me feel like you have some big balls. You’re in videos with black men, and you’re bringing out black women on your stages, but you don’t want to know how black women feel about something that’s so important? Come on, you can’t want the good without the bad. If you want to enjoy our culture and our lifestyle, bond with us, dance with us, have fun with us, twerk with us, rap with us, then you should also want to know what affects us, what is bothering us, what we feel is unfair to us. You shouldn’t not want to know that.’’
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Images and Text: NYTimes
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