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Nicki Minaj, Again
12/22/23
BY: IAN SHERRY
On December 8, 2023, Nicki Minaj released her first album in 5 years: Pink Friday 2.
Nicki Minaj embodies a unique position in today’s music landscape as one of the most simultaneously overplayed and underrated artists of all time. Like her pal Drake, her popularity often overshadows her technical ability, and her sound. Both artists are dismissed as one-dimensional based on the portion of their work that hits the charts. This is understandable, considering both artists produce stylistically unattractive moments on almost every album. However, if you really dig into Drake, you’d hear a decent rapper. Not my favorite by any means, but decent. Similarly, but to the extreme, if you really dig into Nicki Minaj, you’d hear one of the most skilled rappers of all time. Her influence on rap as an industry is immeasurable. From her mainstream sexual branding to her marketing and release strategies, to her pure skill and style on the microphone, she sets the standard for any rapper wishing to straddle the lines of hip-hop and pop. Minaj, in my book, is the undisputed queen of rap. This year, she was tasked with expanding her legacy after years away.
Nicki Minaj, as good as she is, has never been the strongest at crafting a well-executed, complete album. This holds her back from certain elite conversations. Her flows and bars are consistently elite, but her thematic focus and song curation occasionally fall short. This isn’t to say she hasn’t made good albums, in fact she has some classics. But their status benefits greatly from their chart-topping hits and far-reaching influence. Even if they weren’t perfectly crafted masterpieces, Pink Friday, The Pinkprint, and Queen defined their respective eras of mainstream rap and have aged gracefully due to Minaj’s looming presence and unshakeable relevance. However, until the recent release of Pink Friday 2, Nicki Minaj hadn’t made an album since 2018, raising the question: can she deliver in a culturally significant way? Although Minaj is still relevant, five years removed, she’s a clear notch below her prime popularity. Mainstream rap is heavily reliant on being in style, and she hasn’t been this far on the outside since she secured a feature on Kanye West’s “Monster”. That was in 2010, this is 2023.
The Samples
Danny Brown revealed sometime in the last 10 years (time flies when you can’t find the date of the video) that when constructing his critically acclaimed album Atrocity Exhibition, he expended so much of his production budget on securing the rights to samples, prior to rollout and other post-production expenses, that he initially lost money on the album. An up-and-comer at the time, Brown’s inexperience with fiscal management and industry norms, coupled with his enthusiasm for the music, led to him being broke when his 2016 record was released, and consequently, he stayed in the red for the years that followed. While I’m certain Nicki Minaj wasn’t scrolling through Danny Brown content on Instagram, she seems to be very aware of her capacity for luxurious samples. She lets you know immediately with “Are You Gone Already”, which samples Billie Eilish’s “when the party's over”. Off the top of my partially focused head, I can’t think of any other song that samples a song that charted so recently. If you read the Genius annotation, this is pitched as a collaboration between Eilish, Minaj, and FINNEAS, but in reality it’s a remix of the pop hit with a partial lyrical alignment between the rap verses and sampled refrain that sets the tone. Meanwhile on “Pink Friday Girls” and “Super Freaky Girl,” Minaj attempts to assemble poppy anthems around “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” and “Super Freak,” respectively. A common criticism of rap, uttered by many including Prince, is that sampling is a way to construct your ‘music’ entirely around someone else’s work. This implies that a rapper jumps in the studio and begins vocalizing over a slightly restructured version of someone else’s original. Anyone who’s listened to intricate sample-work, (check out The Alchemist), would understand this is an inaccurate, outmoded take.
And now you’ll have to brace yourself for an immediate contradiction. On all three of the aforementioned songs, Minaj only makes slight alterations to the original song, cutting verses and adding drums and bass. She even lazily chipmunks Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” for the chorus of “My Life”. The basic repackaging of all these former hits allows Nicki Minaj to lay down different personas over a canvas that was painted for her. This is a fine strategy on paper, but so is fouling Shaquille O’Neil every time he touches the ball. It’s just not what we’re here for. Danny Brown didn’t have the money to spend, but he spent it anyway on creative sample selection, which he wove into one of the most unique individual album soundscapes in hip-hop history. So after five years away, Nicki Minaj had plenty of money to spend, and she chose to spend it on a random shuffle of chart-topping hits.
The Flows
Switching to the positive, Nicki Minaj has one of the most multifaceted vocal delivery skillsets of all time. She can rap in a variety of speeds, moods, even accents. At this stage in her career, sustaining an elite level of vocal expertise is easier said than done. Legendary rappers like Eminem or Q Tip, for example, have been rendered vocally unimpressive in recent years. In other words, it’s possible to age out of your flows. Minaj hasn’t. Pink Friday 2’s second track, “Barbie Dangerous,” comes out firing as the jumping-off point of the album. She works with pace and precision, setting a high standard that she maintains for the majority of the album. Whether it’s going bar-for-bar with J Cole (he’s on a tear) on “Let Me Calm Down,” embracing Lil Uzi Vert’s 2023 sound on “Everybody,” bringing in the island sound on “Forward From Trini,” or parading her early-career princess persona on “Pink Friday Girls,” Minaj delivers on expert rap performance after another. That kind of versatility is invaluable. It often allows Minaj to act as her own feature, considering her seamless shapeshifting from verse to verse. Frankly, that’s what holds this album together.
The Givens
If you listen to Nicki Minaj, this album is nothing new. We know she can rap, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we know she can’t sing. She does it anyway, often singing on her own choruses and refrains despite her access to a plethora of alternative options. This is a stylistically misguided choice that rappers like J Cole also fall victim to. However, unlike Cole, she often compiles mistakes by failing to supply sufficient instrumental backing on songs that emphasize her singing. But, like I said, I knew it was coming. I also knew this album would bring a mixed bag of features. J Cole and Lil Wayne deliver on tracks 6 and 7, while Drake and Future flop on tracks 9 and 19. I also knew there would be a mix of moods, which could be interpreted as aimless or diverse. “Fallin 4 You” is one of the best executed, vulnerable songs of Minaj’s career, while “Bahm Bahm” mirrors Minaj’s classic energy-infused club-radio formula. I knew the album would be defined more by its hits than skips. I knew the Barbs would make sure the album charted regardless of merit. I knew what to expect, and although I hoped for something else, (more out of desperation for the unpredictable than dislike for the usual), I was right.
Nicki Minaj made another album, and it’s much like her others. Its mainstream relevance is measured in comparison to her past releases, but in proportion to her current cultural standing. The album scores points for it’s highlights, “Red Ruby Da Sleeze” and “Super Freaky Girl,” to name a few, but loses points since those singles were released 9 and 16 months ago respectively. Pink Friday 2 gave me so little to expand upon that I spent most of my energy analyzing Nicki Minaj’s mindset around sampling.
So, to bring this review to a conclusion in a fittingly generic fashion, here’s a cliche to summarize the experience of Pink Friday 2: For every push in one direction, there’s a pull in another. My disappointment stems from predictability, yet the inalienable positives of the Nicki Minaj sound push this album slightly into positive territory. I think the blank stare with which I’m listening to and writing about this album is the best summation of its quality, but I’ll give it a score nonetheless.
Pink Friday 2 is a 5.3/10.