New Videos: Nicki Minaj Fights, T.I. Rocks

Nicki Minaj's "Right Thru Me" is her second video to drop this week ("Check It Out," her Buggles-sampling collabo with Will.i.am, landed Monday), and while the music itself is almost balladesque, Nicki's raps are rapid-fire, and she spends more than half of this clip arguing with her suave and sculpted boyfriend in a variety of opulent domestic settings. (There are also bits of reconciliation — and hazy shots of a bikini-clad Minaj lip-synching in the shower.)

Photos: The Fashion of Nicki Minaj

"Ya Hear Me" is presumably T.I.'s last video to drop before he heads back to prison. It's a simple performance clip, with the MC joined by a Funkadelicized rock band and the occasional dancing woman, probably thrown together to keep the buzz up in advance of the still-unscheduled release of his long-delayed next LP (formerly called King Uncaged, since changed to No Mercy). "I ain't lookin' for no trouble," T.I. Raps, adding, "I ain't duckin' none."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

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