Nicki Minaj: The New Queen of Hip-Hop
For the umpteenth time today, Nicki Minaj is applying a thick layer of bright-pink gloss to her pouty lips, regarding herself regally in a plastic-backed hand mirror. “I’m not used to wearing my makeup for hours and hours,” the rapper says. “It makes my face feel like bleh.” She had been sweetly perky all day, but now she’s turned sullen, hiding under a cute straw hat. As her chauffeured SUV crawls toward Santa Monica, Minaj is revving up for a diva temper tantrum. “You’ve got to be paying attention,” she snarls at her assistant, who just gave the driver questionable directions to a strip-mall Chinese restaurant.
The driver thinks she’s talking to him, and turns around to protest. Under the shadow cast by her hat, Minaj rolls her big, dark, green-rimmed eyes. “I’m not talking to you, sir,” she says (it comes out “tawk-ing” — she moved to Jamaica, Queens, from her birthplace of Trinidad circa age five). “Would you please just leave me alone? I’m talking to him!” She’s still staring in the mirror, still working on the lips.
It’s 4 p.m., and Minaj, 25, hasn’t eaten since breakfast. She slept four hours last night, which is more than she’s used to. Minaj is on an endless promotional tour behind Pink Friday, her debut album — which should cement her status as hip-hop’s leading female artist, and the hottest new rapper this side of her friend Drake.
In August, she capped off two years of song-stealing guest appearances (collaborating with everyone from Mariah Carey to Gucci Mane) with an astonishing verse on Kanye West’s “Monster”: She leaps between styles, voices and personas from bar to bar, rapping with a crazed fury that’s like Ol’ Dirty Bastard multiplied by Busta Rhymes. It’s become her signature trick — as if she’s determined to make up for the lack of female voices in hip-hop by providing five or six of them herself.
West was impressed. “The scariest artist in the game right now is Nicki Minaj,” he said. “She has the most potential out of everyone to be the number-two rapper of all time, cause nobody’s gonna be bigger than Eminem.” Eminem offered his own endorsement of Minaj, guesting on the unhinged Friday single “Roman’s Revenge.”
But Minaj’s key patron was Lil Wayne, who signed her to his label, Young Money, in 2009, serving as her mentor. The label took its time releasing a Minaj album, letting her build her reputation through mix-tapes and guest appearances — the same strategy that made Wayne a superstar before the release of 2008’s Tha Carter III. By this October, Minaj was on seven singles in the Hot 100 at once.
On one level, Minaj’s multiple personalities, her ability to shift mid-sentence from girly sweetness to a guttural growl, reflect her drama training: She graduated from LaGuardia Arts high school, a.k.a. the Fame school. In an unguarded moment earlier in the day, she talked about how hard she practices her verses: “I hate to do a cold read in the booth,” she said, sounding distinctly show-bizzy. She’s proud that she and Drake — a former star of the Canadian teen show Degrassi: The Next Generation — are offering a different face for hip-hop. “At one time, you had to sell a few kilos to be considered a credible rapper,” she says. “But now it’s like Drake and I are embracing the fact that we went to school, we love acting, we love theater, and that’s OK — and it’s especially good for the black community to know that’s OK, that’s embraced.”
Minaj’s actual personality can be hard to nail down. “One minute I’m the innocent kid sister, and the next minute I’m screaming with 18 heads,” she says later. “I definitely think life imitates art, or art imitates life. People used to tell me, ‘What is wrong with you? You’ll just sit there and think and get yourself depressed.’ I’ve always been a thinker.”
As the driver pulls into the strip mall to finally get her some food, she’s already cooling down. She giggles when a fellow passenger warns the driver to watch a small child walking in the lot: “That’s all we need right now.” Minaj has lived in L.A. for months, but she hasn’t seen much of the city besides her apartment and the recording studio where she worked on Pink Friday. She doesn’t allow herself time to do anything but work: Her five-year plan includes a film career, a perfume line, a clothing line and maybe records that feature her singing as much as rapping. “There’s this fear of not being perfect,” she says. “There’s some songs I just won’t write because I’m afraid of it not meeting my expectation of what I know that song could be. I don’t compete with other people, I compete with myself.”
She has little trouble locating the source of her ambition. “When I first came to America,” she says, “I would go in my room and kneel down at the foot of my bed and pray that God would make me rich so that I could take care of my mother. Because I always felt like if I took care of my mother, my mother wouldn’t have to stay with my father, and he was the one, at that time, that was bringing us pain. We didn’t want him around at all, and so I always felt like being rich would cure everything, and that was always what drove me.”