can we ever truly cancel nicki minaj
a cultural analysis of "zont zo it, zont, zont zo itttttt"
This past weekend, my best friend Tess hosted her birthday party. The theme was “dress as your problematic fave.” Before I even said anything to her, she said, “you’re going to go as Nicki Minaj.”
It wasn’t a question, because she was right. Nicki Minaj is easily my problematic fave. I don’t even need to think twice about it. She’s faced a slew of increasingly weird and dire controversies over the years — fighting Cardi B, marrying a convicted predator, outing her cousin for having big balls during a Twitter rant about not trusting COVID vaccines — but she’s such a fave. And I think many would say the same. Nothing more has proved it than this month’s release of “Red Ruby Da Sleaze,” her back-to-back no. 1 chart debut, the first female rapper to debut at no. 1 since Lauryn Hill in 1998.
Nicki Minaj, not Onika Tanya Maraj, represents something different to many of us. For some, she’s a symbol of Black girlhood. For others, she’s a vessel for queerness and diva worship. Many of our individual childhood moments can be bookmarked by some Barbie moment (“Starships,” “Bang Bang,” anyone?). I’m not going to sit here and tell you your Nicki Minaj story. But here’s mine.
I’m not an original Nicki fan. I joined the Barbz for real in 2014, when The Pinkprint was released. Beam Me Up Scotty was a thing before I started listening to songs not on the radio, so the first Nicki track I ever heard was “Super Bass.” For a while, I thought she was just another drop in the pop landscape. I did like Pink Friday and Roman Reloaded — I probably still have them on my old iPod somewhere. But when I moved to the US, a girl in history class showed me “Itty Bitty Piggy.” Then I listened to The Pinkprint all the way through. And that, quite frankly, changed my life forever.
Critically, The Pinkprint became a turning point for Minaj. Billboard called it her “best album to date” and garnered her industry respect as a rap heavyweight. Sonically, it was a more serious and authoritative album. It also visually marked the end of Nicki’s Harajuku Barbie era, replaced by waistlong inches, frosty lip gloss and bodycon dresses.
With the court-appropriate dresses came the court-appropriate behavior. Nicki took no prisoners during the Pinkprint years. She called Miley Cyrus out for cultural appropriation, right there on stage, when Miley was standing up there wearing locs, looking a fool. Miley, what’s good? She supposedly shaded Iggy Azalea and said, “when you hear Nicki Minaj spit, Nicki Minaj wrote it,” before sipping metaphorical tea that was immediately GIFed into oblivion. She called out the VMAs when “Anaconda” was not nominated for video of the year, despite its impact on internet history. And where did she lie! Where did she lie!
Nicki Minaj was everything to me in this era. I found a kinship in her; she was a silly, goofy theater girl bursting to the seams with ambition, just like me (fr). She’d been hurt by the world and still stood up for what she believed in, in the face of a million people who never gave her a chance to be serious. She had something to say. So at this point in her career, she was about to fucking say it.
There is no one more misunderstood or underestimated than the teenage girl. It’s the most frustrating dilemma, to know in your bones that you are destined for better things than what people are constantly telling you. You experience traumatic burdens that you are expected to shoulder quietly, lest you be even further delegitimized. Your joy is designated as vapid and unimportant. Yet you are a driving force behind culture without ever fully realizing it.
So maybe I felt judged for my Otherness, or felt unbridled rage when people implied I wasn’t smart enough for the things I wanted, but The Pinkprint made me believe that I could make a future for myself where I embodied such strength, too. And with the internet, I had the tools to live out my manifestations. When I finally got on Instagram, Nicki was one of the first people I followed. With my friends, we pieced together the “Feeling Myself” music video during lunch via bootleg YouTube clips, because we were broke and couldn’t afford Tidal. I watched the live performance of Beyoncé and Nicki during the On the Run tour (Beyoncé - Flawless (Remix) ft. Nicki Minaj on YouTube) every single morning before school. I didn’t feel nearly as beautiful or confident or worthy as these women on a day-to-day basis, but for five minutes every morning, I imagined a world in which I could be.
Note: She also voiced a mammoth in Ice Age: Continental Drift that was named Steffi and I literally thought that meant we were like, spiritually linked (“she’s a mammoth, of course”).
There’s that now-famous video of Minaj addressing tabloids at the time criticizing her for storming out of a low-budget photoshoot.
“You have to be a beast. That’s the only way they respect you,” she says. “When I come to a photoshoot, let it be of quality. You know why? I put quality in what I do […] so if I turn up to a photoshoot, and you got a $50 clothes budget, and some sliced pickles on a fucking board, you know what, I am gonna leave. Is that wrong? For wanting more for myself, wanting people to treat me with respect? But next time, they know better. But had I accepted the pickle juice, I would be drinking pickle juice right now.”
That’s what Nicki Minaj was to us. A force in mainstream culture that asked us — no, demanded us — to want more for ourselves, as women, as women of color, as queer youth. Not to ask for what we think we deserve, but asked what we want. No matter what people tell you you are, no matter what cards you think you will be handed, what do you want out of all of this? And while there were many stars out there at the time who spoke about empowerment, no one else had ever asked me what I wanted, besides Roman, Martha, Harajuku Barbie and Nicki Lewinsky.
Other people must have this same emotional connection to Nicki Minaj. I don’t think the Barbz would be the fandom it is today without it. And that kind of cultural impact might be part of the reason why we can never seem to shake her. She continues to dominate trending audios on TikTok. Her face continues to be used in memes, her celebrity beef serves as reference points throughout recent pop culture history. When “Itty Bitty Piggy” started playing at the party, everyone still got up off their feet and sang along. I dont fuck with pigs like As-salamu alaykum — I put ‘em in a field, I let Oscar Mayer bake ‘em!
I can’t rap all the verses on every album anymore (“Chi-Raq” and “Whip It” have long escaped my memory), but I still know The Pinkprint cover to cover. I don’t know at what point her ironclad set of beliefs — to call out misogynoir, empower other women, stay in school — became fixated on haranguing haters and ignoring valid criticisms. There will probably be a point in time where I regret telling you about this, because I’m sure this is not the end of the disintegration. But I always have a place in my heart for the work she gave to us.
That’s my Nicki Minaj story. Maybe your story isn’t as personal as mine. Maybe it’s even more so. But it doesn’t matter if you love her or hate her or think she’s weird. How can we ever cancel someone who has mattered so much to the people that are the backbone of the internet?