If you missed the showdown of the month in June, here’s a quick recap. It featured one of the music world’s fastest rising artistes, Nicki Minaj, radio jockey Peter Rosenberg, and the track Starship from Nicki’s second album, Pink Friday Roman Reloaded, released in April this year. Minutes before Nicki was to headline the Summer Jam concert hosted by US radio station Hot 97, Rosenberg — a presenter with the station — made some remarks to the crowd about what he considered Nicki’s straying from the true values of hip-hop to create tracks like Starship. Nicki pulled out of the concert. An unapologetic Rosenberg went on to face a severe backlash on social networking sites, from Nicki’s fans, and the hip-hop brotherhood at large.
Rosenberg had a (tiny) point. From Starship (track 10 on Roman Reloaded) to the penultimate Gun Shot (18th on the list), Nicki’s latest album is more disco pop than hip-hop. There’s barely any of the powerful, quicksilver rapping that marks her standout tracks like Stupid Hoe and Come On A Cone. Instead, you could be forgiven for thinking this is something Katy Perry would produce. But that’s probably a mark of who Nicki truly is, as an artiste: A musical chameleon.
While the production on her album brings in elements from Broadway tunes to choir music, disco, bubblegum pop, R&B and the best that hip-hop has to offer, Nicki herself transmutes from expletive laden rap to angelic singing that would do an R&B diva proud. Then there are her accents — from Caribbean to Brit and American (Nicki was incidentally born in Trinidad, although she moved to New York at the age of five), she picks them up at will, leaving you with the distinct impression that these are different people. In Stupid Hoe, the last track on the album, the switch is especially impactful, especially since Nicki manages it so effortlessly: From a baby voiced, singsong rap to a full throated croon in the matter of a verse.
And to prove Rosenberg wrong, what’s even more in evidence in this album — quite apart from Nicki’s versatility — is that fact that the girl can definitely rap. In a genre that hasn’t had too many powerful female figures to boast of (a Missy Elliot or Li’l Kim being the only ones who could boast of a global following), Nicki is a revelation. Her only contemporary might possibly be M.I.A, but while the Sri Lankan songstress is extremely popular, she hasn’t managed the kind of Billboard success that Nicki has. And while Nicky and M.I.A both deal with issues that have long since been left out of the hip-hop mainstream (commercial is a weak word to use for the lyrics and imagery that most artistes turn out these days, even the top-notch ones, with Missy Elliot being no exception), Nicki takes it many levels further with her rapidfire changes in persona.
So her album cover shows a blonde-haired Nicki in a sexually explicit pose, splattered with paint in candy hues. Much like another popular pop icon, Lady Gaga, Nicki’s performances are an elaborately staged exercise in fancy dress (at the Grammys, Nicki showed up in a blood red nun-like habit, with a Pope impersonator for company). Unlike Gaga though, Nicki is a real musical pioneer and you can sense it on tracks like Champion, where her rapping prowess reminds you of Kanye West (with whom she collaborated on the 2010 hit Monster).
The collaborations on Roman Reloaded too are fairly satisfying. There’s her Young Money label chief, Lil Wayne, providing able support on Sex in The Lounge and the title track. Chris Brown provides the smooth melodies for Right By My Side while the subversive twist is left to Chainz in Beez In The Trap.
And ultimately, that’s the sound that you take away from Roman Reloaded. Not the “Harajuku Barbie” who could give teenybopper pop stars a run for their money, and whom Rosenberg chose to pull up in his rant. But the edgy Nicki Minaj, the one who is being hailed as the greatest female rapper of all time by publications like The New York Times — and deservedly so.