She represents the new breed: the femcee without constraints, able to leap tall Billboard charts at a single bound a raptress succeeding as the most revered figure in music: the pop star.Ī lot has been said about hip-hop’s newest female superstar: the accolades are as numerous as the criticisms. Nicki Minaj, with her otherworldly, free-spirited, make-the-rules-as-I-go persona(s) is the new embodiment of the female rapper: a gorgeous blend of eighties femme bravado and nineties femme fatale, sexy pinup and the same decade’s funky fembot style. She was the first and last iconic female rapper. Lil’ Kim, well, Kim was off being Lil’ Kim and, unfortunately, because of bad decisions and curious cosmetic surgery, the Queen Bee had become a self-constructed caricature of the feminine hip-hop force that had seen her worshipped. Missy Misdemeanor Elliott’s last major hit was in the middle of the last decade. Miss Hill walks, talks and performs among the living, but Lauryn Hill – the mega-watt MC and former Fugees singer who won over the world – died off long ago. We were entering another decade and, while the future of hip-hop was undoubtedly exciting, the landscape for female MCs was not. The few preceding years before Nicki Minaj emerged as a force to be reckoned with in 2010 had seen many give up on the idea of another female rap superstar.
At the time, there weren’t any female rappers still relevant on a large scale, and Nicki saw her chance. When Nicki emerged nationally, the lane for female rappers was essentially closed. Nicki Minaj’s ascendancy to the upper echelons of the music industry is a testament to the drastically different times we now live in, where fame is certainly more attainable than ever before, but it is also an example of someone identifying a void and quickly filling it. How else could this Caribbean-born, Queens-bred wannabe rapper leap from the realms of the unknown rap amateur in urban street hip-hop DVDs to performing and dropping it low alongside the most legendary pop star to walk the planet during the Super Bowl halftime show – the most watched entertainment performance every year around the world?
To call the self-described Harajuku Barbie unreal (Harajuku being the over-the-top street style of Japanese girls hanging out at Harajuku Station in Tokyo, introduced to the pop music world back in 2004 by Gwen Stefani in her track ‘Harajuku Girls’) may be the only way to make sense of her nearly impossible, beyond meteoric rise to superstardom. Minaj gave a lyrical lashing to her (non-existent) competitors, an about-face to the song’s co-stars (including a couple of guys named Jay-Z and Rick Ross) and an overall unapologetic middle finger to all those who, at the time, still doubted that she could even rap. It’s also not that during the few short years of her time on the rap scene, she has unleashed some of the most ridiculous lyrics ever heard, such as: First thing’s first, I’ll eat your brains/Then I’mma start rocking gold teeth and fangs, which she memorably quipped on the Kanye West-produced 2010 hit song ‘Monster’.
#ISOUL RADIO SKIN#
It’s not just that she dresses in candy-coated outrageousness: sporting severely dyed wigs and rocking colour-clashing and second skin get-ups that have pushed the boundaries of hip-hop and fashion.
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