Friday Fancy: Nicki Minaj

by Devil’s Food Cake

I can’t help it. I fucking love this woman. I could reel off a list of reasons – she’s the first woman in 8 years to take #1 on the Billboard Rap chart, she’s got a big mouth and will use it to call you out, she’s half-Indian (I’ll take it where I can get it), she’s a fucking great rapper, she looks amazing with green hair… the list goes on.

Before Ms. Minaj came along, women in rap were either passed out or just plain not really there. I mean, yeah, Ciara, I love you and Kelis, you’re awesome too, but how long has it been since we’ve last seen a female rapper? I mean. Missy hasn’t put anything out for ages, and the rest of my personal favourites quietened down a long time ago. And then came Nicki. Loud and unabashedly in-your-face, it’s hard not to notice her. She even made Mariah Carey bearable again for a while – I had ‘Up Out My Face’ on replay purely for Nicki’s verses.

And as she so eloquently points out on that Monster collaboration, girlfriend was commanding a hefty cut for her talents – before she’d put out an album of her own – talk about cash money.

If I didn’t have love for her before, it was definitely there after reading her interview with the Observer. Damn if I don’t like a woman who’s talented and smart as a whip. I mean, read the following and tell me you don’t swoon:

I feel that I am doing everything the boys can and have done, plus more. And so if I go ahead and say, ‘Yeah, it’s man’s world’, I feel like I would make young girls feel like, ‘Oh God, well Nicki even said it’s a man’s world.’ No, no: it’s a leader’s world. Doesn’t matter if you’re a man or woman.

Well, hell-o. You’ve also got to admire a woman who can use so much pink without calling to mind Miss Piggy, and who writes lyrics as fucking sharp as a razor. My personal fave from her just-released album Pink Friday is a track called Roman’s Revenge, which is not, as I recently discovered, something you should play at the office without headphones.

It doesn’t look like she’ll be touring outside the States until next year (and there’s no way she’ll be allowed to perform where I live at the moment) but the minute I get the chance to see her live I will be all. over. that. shit. And, uh… over to you.