NICKI MINAJ PINK FRIDAY (YOUNG MONEY/UNIVERSAL MOTOWN)
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I wish “I’m the Best” were an aberration. But alas, Pink Friday is filled nigh to bursting with blandness. You know those swelling, earnest, I-have-overcome bullshit tracks that even decent rappers often put at the ends of their CDs, where you can conveniently avoid them? Imagine a whole album of that, and you’ve got a general idea of what Minaj has perpetrated. The Rihanna collaboration “Fly” is the sort of dreary gush you’d expect from a song that uses “fly” as a verb; the Natasha Bedingfield collaboration “Last Chance” is the sort of dreary gush you’d expect from a Natasha Bedingfield collaboration. But don’t blame the R&B songstresses: Minaj proves she can suck all on her lonesome with dross like “Here I Am,” where she actually says, “I’m a woman, hear me roar.” What’s next—is she going to call Lil Wayne the wind beneath her wings?
As the two poles of “Monster” make clear, Minaj has flirted throughout her career with both of the standard hip-hop roles for women: sex kitten and ball breaker. That flirtation, though, has up till now tended to be oddly and in some ways refreshingly halfhearted. True, Minaj wears preposterous ass-accentuating outfits in the video for the pre-album promo track “Massive Attack” and huge castrating claws in video for Ludacris’s “My Chick Bad,” but for the most part it’s remarkable how little she seems to care about teasing cocks or cutting them off. Her focus is almost always on, as she invariably puts it, “bitches.” One of the decent tracks on Pink Friday, “Did It on ‘Em,” is fairly characteristic: “All these bitches is my sons. . . . If I had a dick I would pull it out and piss on ’em.”
Like most rappers, Minaj doesn’t have Eminem’s skills, but she doesn’t get blown away either. From her first stuttering transgender declaration—”I am not Jasmine, I am Aladdin!”—she spits insults and threats, at one point even comparing herself to Eli Manning, and in general she sounds lean, mean, and nuts.
