I watch Nicki Minaj’s videos, like this most recent one:
and I listen to her songs, particularly this new collabo with Eminem:
and I wonder if Nicki is going to admit that the characters are bullshit.
If the song wasn’t called “Roman’s Revenge” there’d be no way to distinguish Roman from Nicki Minaj. Roman Zolanski doesn’t even emerge here as a fully formed persona*. None of her personas do. None of it feels to me like an artist experimenting with persona, so much as an artist who likes to play with inflection was asked why she likes to play with inflection and gave some silly answer that makes her sound more intentional and creative than I think she is.
And now she’s sorta forced to do songs in these voices. But she has not yet figured out how to make these characters distinct enough that the performances feel fluid, or even clash in ways that convincingly portray schizophrenia.
Why not just go for broke and make these characters truly distinct? Give them each their own flow, cadence, point of view. I mean…something.
I don’t know. My girl Alyssa admires what she does visually, but I just see a disgusting orientalism that is even more offensive than when Gwen Stefani was doing it. But it does intrigue me that her visual artistry bests her musical artistry, at least in so far as it feels coherent and complete a statement…of something.
We are in an historical moment where larger than life women (Lady Gaga and Janelle Monae) are more interesting than real women (Chrisette Michelle and Jazmine Sullivan). What bothers me tremendously about that – particularly in the case of black women who just have a hard time if they aren’t jezebels like Beyonce or earth mother soul goddesses like Jill Scott** – is that when you strip away the larger than life part, there just isn’t much there.
It just seems like a bunch of women who grew up watching Madonna and Grace Jones and only saw reinvention, not intention.
*In fairness, Eminem’s Slim Shady persona never felt all that real to me either. There was a loose distinction between The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, and The Eminem Show, but nowhere near as great and distinct as I think was intended. That said, he never pimped this trinity in quite the way Nicki Minaj is pimping these personas.
*To be clear, I’m talking about the image and marketing of these two women. Though Beyonce’s first album was a three-dimensional statement of young black womanhood at the start of the 21st century, the image that was sold was one of a wanton sexual creature. Jill did a whole album that sexualized and humanized her and people hated it. So I think both women are capable of complicating their personas, but it’s unlikely that the marketplace will notice and respond favorably.
Maybe Onika’s persona’s don’t seem authentic because they aren’t of her own making. I’m convinced that everything she is as “Nicki Minaj” and subsequent and divergent selves is the doing of some man or team of men in the lab.
Perhaps. I’d like to believe she’s making her own moves, but even if it is Wayne’s idea she’s not selling it at the artistic level at all.
Thanks for commenting, Peebs!