Discovered by Lil Wayne on a street DVD, Nicki Minaj enjoyed an early buzz that, while strong, hinged on a common archetype: a female rapper who wasn’t hard to look at. But after a year in which the 26-year-old Queens native, born Onika Tanya Maraj, contributed sexually explicit and surprisingly self-aware verses for a slew of Young Money bangers (“Bedrock,” “Up All Night,” and “Roger That”) and became the go-to gal for Usher (“Lil Freak”), Robin Thicke (“Shakin’ It 4 Daddy”), Ludacris (“My Chick Bad”), and Mariah Carey (“Up Out My Face”), she transcended hood-ornament status to be one of the hottest rappers in the game, period.
Her penchant for animated accents and a Harajuku-influenced love for colorful getups begat a cult of personality so strong that even a big-budget disaster like her poorly received first single, “Massive Attack,” couldn’t hold her down. Nicki simply licked her wounds (if only we had been there to help) and came back with the sweet and sultry “Your Love,” which became the first female single to top the Billboard rap charts in eight years. With her debut, Pink Friday, due in November, we’ll soon have a clearer view of which Nicki will be remembered. But whether mold-shattering superstar or Young Money footnote, one thing is clear: She’ll be the one calling the shots.
Complex: Everyone has this image of you as a cartoon character with outlandish wigs, but at our shoot today you were much more low-key. Nicki Minaj: [Laughs.] Every woman is a character—but people need to see I’m a regular human. It’s like you wear a pink wig and you’re no longer human all of sudden. You’re a thing. Like today [the photographer] was like, “Where is that Nicki Minaj smile?” But this shoot doesn’t call for the Nicki Minaj smile. You guys wanted me subdued, so I’m gonna give you a different side. I’m not gonna pull a string and be like, “It’s Barbie, bitch!”
Is it intimidating to know that, besides The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, there are very few indisputable classic female rap albums? Nicki Minaj: I want to do well, but I don’t think I’m intimidated. People’s expectations of what I’m capable of doing are very low. People have been used to hearing little one-liners and me play around.
You think people still underestimate you, even with the success you’ve been having? Nicki Minaj: Absolutely. A lot of people don’t know I wrote all the hooks on the album. I arranged the music, did the transitions. [Other female rappers] are told what to do, but I run my entire empire; I don’t think people would expect that.
Was it hard for you to get that latitude from the label? Nicki Minaj: My generation is creative; all we need is a Baby or a Slim to back us. We don’t need you to tell us what to do, but we need you to nurture our decisions, and I think Cash Money understands that. I didn’t have Wayne obviously, since he’s been in jail, so there wasn’t anyone I could have called and asked for help. Actually, when I’ve relied on people in the past is when I’ve made the biggest mistakes. When I trust my gut, I win.
What are some of your biggest mistakes? Nicki Minaj: I won’t say.
Were they recent mistakes? Nicki Minaj: Yeah.
Recent as in “Massive Attack”? Nicki Minaj: [Laughs.] Next question.
What has Wayne’s involvement been on the album? Nicki Minaj: He really hasn’t had any involvement on it. But to be honest, the album doesn’t sound like Wayne. I mean, he’s my biggest influence, but it doesn’t sound like Wayne’s stuff. It sounds like Nicki.
You have the smash single “Your Love” out right now. When did you record it? Nicki Minaj: Two years ago, before I dropped Beam Me Up Scotty. I loved the beat and the hook, but I didn’t like my delivery on it; that’s why I re-recorded it when it leaked. [Before it leaked] I was like, “This is going in the trash.” (more…)
Young Money labelmates Drake and Nicki Minaj may have playfully joked about jumping the broom—both on record (Drake’s “Miss Me”) and Twitter—but Nicki says she’s waiting ’til age 40-plus before donning a wedding dress.
The 26-year-old MC planned out her next 20 years in VIBE’s Juice issue, revealing that she’ll be ready to settle down in 15 years.
“I want the beach wedding,” Minaj said. “Everything would be white and soft pink. I hate red!”
She continues: “I’d be wearing a strapless dress, gripping around the waist, with a never-ending train. No shoes, just my feet in the sand.”
As for guests, there’s room for little Barbies and a special performer not in Lil Wayne’s crew.
“[I’d] have five little flower girls dressed in Hawaiian straw skirts,” Minaj says. “Then Beyoncé would sing ‘Smash Into You’ and I’d cry like, ‘Oh God.'”
For now though, those plans are in the distant future. In her June/July VIBE cover story, she said “I don’t date women and I don’t have sex with women,” adding in her current Out magazine cover story, “but I don’t date men either.” —John Kennedy with additional reporting by Tracy Garraud
With her snappy bicurious lyrics and out-of-this-world costume changes, Nicki Minaj is soaring in the most peculiar way. Does she have what it takes to change rap’s homophobic landscape forever?
Nicki Minaj is a 25-year-old rapper from Queens, New York, with a wickedly clever flow and never-ending supply of pop culture punch lines. Except when she’s Roman Zolanski, her gay male alter ego, who spits saucy verses at warp speed. Or the character Nicki Lewinsky, who cozies up to President Carter — better known as superstar rapper Lil Wayne — on a handful of salacious mix tape tracks. She raps about signing her fans’ boobs in a bugged-out Valley girl accent. She’s the first female hip-hop artist to hit number 1 on Billboard’s top rap singles chart since 2003. She’s stolen the spotlight on songs with pop heavyweights Mariah Carey and Usher. And she’s done it all while playing hip-hop’s most dangerous game: sexuality roulette.
Minaj may or may not be attracted to women (more on that later), but she draws a fierce gay following with her brazen lyrics and outsize persona. Beneath her blunt-cut bangs lies a cunning mind capable of weaving sports metaphors and references to ’80s sitcoms into complex rhymes about scoring with girls and blowing guys’ minds. Lady Gaga’s audience was primed to accept her as a sexually adventurous nonconformist by artists like Madonna and David Bowie, but in hip-hop, Nicki Minaj is a real space oddity. Rap has never seen a mainstream rising star this eccentric and brave, yet for all Minaj’s curious artistic choices (two-tone wigs, spontaneous British dialects, shout-outs to Harry Potter) she’s also incredibly popular. She has nearly 1.1 million Twitter followers and a cadre of famous fans like Kanye West, who recently proclaimed she could be the second-biggest rapper of all time, behind Eminem. When her first official album, Pink Friday, arrives in November, Minaj won’t just be the “baddest bitch,” as she calls herself — she’ll be a bona fide phenomenon.
Three years ago, Minaj was an unknown from 50 Cent’s neighborhood trying to get noticed on MySpace. Her mom had filled her childhood home with music (“I knew the whole Diana Ross collection before I was 8,” she says), but her father introduced her to violence. On the 2008 track “Autobiography,” she raps about how her drug-addicted dad tried to burn down the family’s house with her mom still inside. Despite the turmoil — or perhaps because of it — young Nicki was passionately creative. She wrote her first rhyme before she turned 12 (“Cookie’s the name, chocolate chip is the flavor / Suck up my style like a cherry Life Saver”) and attended LaGuardia High School, the arts academy immortalized in Fame, where she studied drama and generated plenty of it.
“I was definitely one of those girls where you heard me before you saw me,” Minaj recalls, kicking off a pair of velvety platform heels in a tidy Los Angeles hotel suite and stretching out her calves, which are tightly wrapped in black leather leggings. She pondered careers as a bus driver or lawyer and worked a day job at Red Lobster saving up money for studio time. When she started to get serious about music, her then-manager recommended she change her name to Minaj (she was born Onika Maraj). Though she now admits she hated it, she obliged, tarting up her image for her first mix tape, 2007’s Playtime Is Over, which opens with a sex line call to 1-900-MS-MINAJ. After she skillfully remade the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Warning” for the DVD documentary The Come Up, she got a call from Lil Wayne. Over the course of two more mix tapes under his supervision, 2008’s Sucka Free and 2009’s Beam Me Up Scotty, she developed ferocious new identities, penned jaw-dropping explicit raps, and emerged as the first lady of Wayne’s Young Money crew. She also started to fend off pervy guys stalking her online by playing to her female fans.
“I started making it my business to say things that would empower women, like, ‘Where my bad bitches at?’ to let them know, ‘I’m here for you,’ ” she says. “Then, when I started going to the shows and it was nothing but girls, it was like, Did I go too far with embracing my girls? Because now they want to kiss and hug me.
Minaj may have encouraged all the lady love with lyrics that imply she’s sexually flexible — or at least curious. None of the famous female rappers rumored to be queer have dared utter the L word, but Minaj has used it repeatedly: “I only stop for pedestrians or a real, real bad lesbian,” she raps on “Go Hard.” On Usher’s “Lil Freak” she trolls the club for a chick with “a real big ol’ ghetto booty” for a ménage à trois, and in the song’s video, which has been viewed more than four million times on YouTube, she spends more time rubbing up on a female conquest than she does with its star.
Nicki Minaj shows off her curious world in the October 2010 issue of Out Magazine, on stands September 13.
The 25-year-old rapper will be performing during the pre-show for this Sunday’s 2010 MTV VMAs.
“Obviously, this is something everybody dreamed of being part of, and I’m no exception to that rule,” she said. “I just feel like this is my coming-out party. This is major for an artist with no album out.”
Nicki Minaj is featured in Paper Magazine for the month of September. Check out the rest of the photos/scans as well as the article in the gallery here.
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