Like Nicki Minaj she raps and sings, and plays with various accents. Take the bawdy Harlem rapscallion Azealia Banks, recipient of a heap of Internet affection in recent months. And that’s just what a new wave of female rappers has done. It’s possible to take just a part of what she’s done and come off as refreshing. In short, emulating Nicki Minaj isn’t hard, because there’s so much to play with.
#NICKI MINAJ RIGHT BY MY SIDE SINGS FULL#
Inside is a 16-page fashion spread full of models (sprinkled amongst commoners) wearing Nicki-inspired fashion: multicolored Afros, top-volume animal prints, neon makeup and shimmering fabrics, on both men and women. The current issue of Paper magazine features a modest Minaj on the cover: salmon blazer, lemon yellow top, Oscar-the-Grouch-green tangle of curls. She’s been on the covers of Vibe, XXL and the Fader, sure, but also of Cosmopolitan, Black Book, Elle and V. (Deep down, she’s too much of a populist truly to go there.) While that was happening, she morphed into the most eclectic black-music style idol since Grace Jones, and certainly the one with the quickest ascent to the style elite, with a look that’s loud, cartoonish and edging toward avant-garde. That was part of the blessing of being singular: with no one around to compare herself to, or for others to compare her to, she became her own watermark. Only rarely did she allow herself to appear secondary to her male counterparts - even on songs like “Monster,” alongside Kanye West and Jay-Z, she more than held her ground. More than any other rapper in the mainstream, she pushed hard against expectations, and won. She had no real competition, and when she signed with Lil Wayne, there was little indication that she would drastically rewrite the rules for female rappers. The Nicki of that era was brassy and coarse, and intermittently clever. She signed with Lil Wayne’s Young Money Records in 2009 on the strength of a couple of years’ worth of mixtapes and street DVD appearances. Thanks to Nicki Minaj and the possibilities she has laid bare, and to hip-hop’s stasis of masculinity it is, outrageously and unprecedentedly, a more exciting time to be a female rapper than a male one.Īs much as anything, this reflects what a barren playing field Nicki Minaj, 29, arrived onto. This is a story about influence, to be sure, but also about the weakening of old walls, and the reshaping of the gates that the gatekeepers keep. Mad?” - but on her own material she’s often straddling a line between hip-hop and pop that no other rapper is capable of, or would even dare.Ī few years ago, before her rise began, there were hardly any female rappers of note now, a new generation, including Azealia Banks, Brianna Perry and Angel Haze, is rising quickly, working territory that she carved out.
And in the lead-up to her new album, out on Tuesday from Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Republic, her new songs have shown that she has no intention of being hemmed in by the expectations of genre, dabbling in slithery R&B on “Right by My Side” and outright giddy dance-pop on “Starships.” When rapping on the songs of others, she’s often the most capable M.C. (Savvy Nicki would never be the one to throw up a middle finger.) At the Grammys in February she gave the most shocking performance, part exorcism and part Broadway spectacle. When Madonna needed to tether her current comeback to the young female transgressors of the day, she chose Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. What’s even more striking is how far her reach extends beyond hip-hop. This hard and complex work has paid off: when she releases her second album, “Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded,” this week, it will be as the most influential female rapper of all time. And she’s a rapid evolver, discarding old modes as easily as adopting new ones. She’s a walking exaggeration, outsize in sound, personality and look. She’s a sparkling rapper with a gift for comic accents and unexpected turns of phrase. BARELY a year and a half has passed since the release of “Pink Friday,” the platinum debut album by Nicki Minaj, but her style is well honed.