Nicki Minaj Research Papers

Nicki Minaj: “The Pinkprint”!

Ms. Nicki Minaj has finally released her third studio album titled “The Pinkprint”. Nicki’s album originally has 19 songs and the deluxe version adds 3 more songs making a total of 22 songs :-).The third full-length studio release for the rapper features guest appearances from Beyoncé, Chris Brown, Drake, Ariana Grande, Skylar Grey, Jeremih, Lil Wayne, Lunchmoney Lewis, and Meek Mill. Nicki Minaj’s real name is Onika Tanya Maraj, and in her recent interviews this past week she has been sharing her own personal perspectives on the songs she has chosen to do on this album because they were very dear to her based on what she’s been going through over the years with
her in the business and dealing with family and relationships. Ms. Minaj has also mentioned details on her upcoming tour coming up in 2015. The first source is titled “Nicki Minaj's-“The Pinkprint" seemingly outperforms expectations; One weekly sales report says it moved 201K” and was written by Brian Cantor. While celebration of the specific figure is best halted until Billboard issues its authoritative sales report Wednesday morning, Nicki Minaj and her fans are probably safe to celebrate the notion that her new “The Pinkprint” topped industry sales forecasts. Eyed for a bow in the 165-175,000 range by Hits Daily Double and a start in the 160,000 territory according to a late-week Billboard report, “The Pinkprint” possibly sold in the vicinity of 200,000 first-week copies. According to Hits Daily Double’s sales report, which typically provides a very strong indication of what will appear in the Billboard/Soundscan data, “The Pinkprint” claims #3 on the weekly sales chart on the strength of 201,000 sales. Insofar as Hits’ report has been more flattering to recent, high-profile releases than Billboard’s, Minaj fans should brace for the possibility that “The Pinkprint” did not cross the 200,000 mark in its first week. They should, not, however, worry that “The Pinkprint” debuted below three on the weekly album sales chart or that it fell short of industry projections. The next article is called “''The Pink Print' by Nicki Minaj, music review” by Jim Farber. On the Queens-reared rapper’s third album, she straightens her famously strange expression and spits some vulnerable truth. In “I Lied,” the star admits the only reason she keeps denying she loves a guy is to keep him “from breaking my heart.” In “Favorite,” she says she wants the primary role in a man’s life, while in “The Crying Game” she emphasizes that she really wants “to love and be loved” — even more than having a brilliant career. It’s a striking move into sincerity for a woman who launched her career with a persona that landed at the far end of cartoonishness, even by hip hop’s wacky standards. On the other hand, the change reflects the prerogative, and new confidence, of a woman who deservedly declares in one new song, “I’m still the highest-selling female rapper, for the record ... I don’t got to compete with a single soul.” In a commercial sense, she does need to compete. Especially given the popularity and resonance of her strongest competitor, Iggy Azalea. Aspects of “The Pink Print” show Minaj understands this well. It’s the most pop-friendly album of her career, primed for evening the playing field with teen-adored stars like Azalea. Before the release of “The Pink Print,” Minaj told interviewers that her new music would bring her back to her harder, hip-hop roots. In fact, “Pink” features friendlier melodies and more singing than ever. Of course, Minaj can rap rings around Iggy, but here she shows it less often. She’s more attuned to the craft of the song than the complexity of the verse. Only a few songs approach the velocity or eccentricity of the rapping in past songs, like the brilliantly dense “Stupid H**.” You’ll find some of the fastest and zaniest rapping in the early single “Anaconda,” which loses points for oversampling Sir Mix A Lot’s classic “Baby Got Back.” There’s also quick work in the album’s one nod to Minaj’s Caribbean roots, the sprightly “Trini Dem Girls,” with guest Lunch Money Lewis. In her song with Beyoncé, “Feeling Myself,” the two undulate through a cheeky ode to masturbation. The song sounds like the natural follow-up to their recent “Flawless” remix. More often the edgier moments come in the sheer terseness, and tartness, of the rhymes. “Got a bow on my panties, cuz my** is a present,” she teases in “Get on Your Knees.” Even here, though, the music leans heavily toward pop, with a soaring chorus voiced by Ariana Grande. In songs like “The Night Is Still Young,” and the iTunes-only bonus song “Truffle Butter,” Minaj hedges further, offering music that further mainstreams EDM. The latter track has an irresistible hook, and features a guest rap from Drake that both upstages Minaj and presents a faster than usual flow from the Canadian rapper. For the entire album’s fun, it keeps returning to heartache, evidenced in a song like “Bed of Lies.” It features both an elaborate, and very hurt, rap from the star. There’s also a chorus from Skylar Grey that’s so feminine it wouldn’t be out of place on a Lilith Tour. Disappointingly, “Pink” hasn’t taken Minaj further into the surreality that first promised to turn her into Missy Elliott to the 10th power. But there’s no denying the album’s catchiness. And in terms of growth, “The Pink Print” goes a long way towards making Minaj’s character as fully rounded as her figure. The third source is titled “Nicki Minaj Bares Her Own Vulnerability on ‘The Pinkprint’” by Rawiya Kamier.
The Pinkprint holds the weight of watching a relationship crumble; where some have public meltdowns and volleys of badmouthing, Nicki Minaj has her punch lines, flows, and ‘an empire also.’ In early November, Nicki Minaj took a bat to a Mercedes Benz that she had lent to Safaree “SB” Samuels, her simultaneous hype man, pseudo-assistant, and boyfriend of 12 years. Earlier in the year, TMZ alleged, citing a police report, that a hotel room spat between the two left Nicki with a busted lip. She and Samuels disputed the account, but rumors of the fight coupled with images that showed Samuels had covered up at least two of his Nicki tattoos, seemed to suggest that, after a turbulent year, the two had split. In other words, Nicki Minaj suffered possibly the greatest heartbreak of her life during the biggest, most closely scrutinized phase of her career. But, under the hawkish eye of the media and through a heavily active social media presence, she carried on as usual. For months, I’ve wondered how. Now I know: Her unusually open third album, The Pinkprint, holds the weight of watching the relationship crumble; where some have public meltdowns and engage in volleys of badmouthing, Nicki has her punch lines, flows, and “an empire also.” Since her ascent to pop stardom, the central narrative of Nicki Minaj’s work has been the divide between so-called “Mixtape Nicki” and “Pop
Nicki.” After she made what seemed like a deliberate decision to put away the Technicolor wigs and fanciful costumes, sloughing off the excesses of the past few years and reverting to her natural hair color, it seemed a prodigal return to her bar-for-bar rap origins was imminent. The shiny, melodic, Dr. Luke-assisted chart-toppers had alienated some of her fan base and, in a seriously gendered way, been co-opted by some as an excuse to deny Nicki her rightful position atop of rap. Case-in-point: a now-quashed but never forgotten feud with Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg, who described her 2012 smash hit “Starships” as “not real hip-hop” and music for “chicks.” But The Pinkprint gives little consideration to the gulf between her various musical selves. Nicki treats the obsession with her pop ambitions as an irrelevant, surface-level irritation. Rather than capitulating, she dives between ballads produced by big names in pop, confessional storytelling with sung hooks, and club-ready bangers that are littered with timely cultural references. She can do it all, and she intends to. The album’s sequencing contextualizes songs like the breakup anthems “Pills N Potions” and “The Crying Game,” on which Nicki raps, “Ain't no smiling faces here, we slamming doors and dishes / Saying we don't miss each other, but it's all fictitious.” After the opening emotionally honest tracks comes a 10-song run that feels like the liberation that can come post break-up: Nicki rides through Texas with Beyoncé on “Feelin’ Myself,” adopts Biggie’s Brooklyn flow in an imitation that is the best since Lil’ Kim’s on “Four Door Aventador”, and has fun in the islands with newcomer Lunchmoney Lewis on “Trini Dem Girls.” Nicki treats the obsession with her pop ambitions as an irrelevant, surface-level irritation. Despite her apparent need for release through music, Nicki is much more successful when she is playing the weirdo and out rapping all of her peers through dozens of flows and voices, borrowed and invented. The album’s latter half sees her sinking back into heartbreak mode, with lackluster ballads “Bed Of Lies” and “Grand Piano.” Though she doesn’t always play to her strengths when she’s determined to go the pop route, it’s the balance and push-and-pull of her output that is most compelling. Mixtape Nicki can’t really exist without Pop Nicki, and vice versa. It turns out, though, that the divide we should have been paying attention to all along is not between rap and pop but the poles between her public and private selves. Despite her omnipresence, The Pinkprint makes it apparent how little we actually know about Nicki Minaj. It’s an approach to fame that suggests she might have taken cues from her now-BFF Beyoncé, a testament to the media training of the Young Money camp, and a reflection of the strong black woman trope that she often plays in public. Political scientist and journalist Melissa Harris-Perry explains the strong black woman character as such: “The strong black woman is kind of a resistant strategy. Her role as a myth is an internal community-created concept of who black women are, and it’s meant to push back against historical negative images like the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the Sapphire. In that sense, she is positive because she is self-naming, she is self-created. She is sui generis.” She is Nicki. On much of The Pinkprint, Nicki takes the cracks that appeared in her generally plastic veneer after the rumor mill began churning and busts them wide open, getting personal in new ways. The Pinkprint is full of once-private revelations that betray the extent to which she’s been hurting: hella pill-popping, suicidal thoughts, her own abusiveness, guilt about the way her fame has impacted her relationships. As much as parts of the album are an exercise in performing strength, being vulnerable is the strongest move Nicki Minaj could have made. “Must-See: Nicki Minaj’s 'The Pinkprint' Short Film” by Jolie A. Doggett says Nicki Minaj bared her soul on her most emotional album to date, The Pinkprint. Now, the rapper continues to vent her emotions with the short film, The Pinkprint Movie, starring Nicki Minaj herself, Willy Monfret, and Boris Kodjoe. In the 16-minute film presented by Beats by Dre, Minaj uses select tracks off of her new album to tell the story of a failing relationship. The film is divided into three parts named after songs: “The Crying Game,” “I Lied,” and “Grand Piano” with each part breaking down the stages of a breaking relationship. Some reports say that the emotional film and the equally emotional album may be based on Minaj’s real-life break up with her longtime boyfriend Safaree Samuels. “Nicki Minaj – The Pinkprint” by Michael Madden talk about how Nicki Minaj is all emotional, dangling in the void of her recent breakup with Safaree “SB” Samuels and grappling with all kinds of what-ifs. Often enough on her third album, The Pinkprint, the 32-year-old flashes the staggering rap technique that caused her 2007 to 2009 mixtapes to blow up, but ultimately, she plays the role of a lovelorn songwriter instead of a rapper or even a rapper-slash-singer. Even when she’s rattling off words at a dizzying rate that guests like Meek Mill would struggle to top, she’s first and foremost looking to tidy up the messiness of her situation — and never before has Minaj defined her situation in such intimate detail. The first we heard from The Pinkprint was “Pills n Potions”, a stripped-back, melancholy song alluding to the temporary relief of self-medicating. Capsules and elixirs are strewn elsewhere on the album, too, but mostly, The Pinkprint is about confronting troubles rather than sighing them away for a night — sometimes literally, like on “The Crying Game”, where Minaj remembers wanting to Ronda Rousey her man during God knows how many arguments. (The song also opens the album’s accompanying short film, preceding the thematically similar “I Lied” and “Grand Piano”.) The opening song, “All Things Go”, couldn’t be any clearer in its purpose, even if the details are fuzzy: From an engagement to a possible abortion/miscarriage to the tension between her and her mother, these are things Minaj needed to vent about ASAP. We probably shouldn’t ask her to perform the song live too often; it already visibly crushed her on Saturday Night Live. “All Things Go” is effective enough, even one of the album’s highlights, but relative to the rest of the album, it’s as straightforward as it gets. She interpolates Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” on the infamous “Anaconda” (to say nothing of the video) and channels a staccato Biggie Smalls flow over the train rumble of “Four Door Aventador” (having already sampled the Brooklyn legend’s “Just Playing (Dreams)” and “Warning” on 2007’s Playtime Is Over tape). But, otherwise, everything sounds like it’s of her own devising. Even “Only” is innovative in a way, as Minaj happily flaunts what’s become one of the world’s most discussed physical frames before Drake and Lil Wayne who both make it clear that they’d be with Minaj if given the chance. One thing they don’t do: out-rap her, as she impresses thanks to higher-level wordplay (“Dinner with my man on a G5 is my idea of a update”) and sheer tenacity (“Tell them b****** blow me/ Lance Stephenson“). On the other hand, you have the album’s unadulterated pop, where Minaj is a balladeer as often as she is an obvious star. The lyrics to “The Night Is Still Young” are as plain as they come, but melodically, it does sound like the soundtrack to a massive evening, especially once that second vocal track kicks in during the chorus, which is just as neon as that of “Pills N Potions”. The Pinkprint is full of guest stars: Jessie Ware on “The Crying Game”, Ariana Grande on the dominatrix anthem “Get on Your Knees” (co-written by Katy Perry), Beyoncé on the spasmodic “Feeling Myself”, a surprisingly pop radio-ready Meek Mill on “Buy a Heart”, and Skylar Grey on “Bed of Lies”. With all these guests in tow, these songs (even “Buy a Heart”) run more pop than hip-hop, but Minaj still raps enough on the album that you never lose sight of the artist who made, for example, “Itty Bitty Piggy” (on which she rapped for nearly 16 bars before stopping DJ Holiday for not giving listeners enough time to brace themselves for her verse: “You gotta get that s*** wet first!”). If you’re looking for pure singing, though, head to the album’s closer, “Grand Piano”, a piano ballad if one has ever existed. Without saying that it’s comparably good, Minaj says she wants The Pinkprint to be to future female MCs as Jay Z’s 2001 The Blueprint was for the opposite sex. That’s a tough task — Jay’s classic was immensely quotable bar-for-bar and had some of the silkiest beats hip-hop had heard, making a star out of a young producer from Chicago named Kanye West. It’s depressing to admit that the album doesn’t have much competition when it comes to major label rap albums made by women (although there are always female rappers up to the challenge, the latest being Iggy Azalea, Azealia Banks, “Try Me” MC DeJ Loaf, and Timblaland protégé Tink). If The Pinkprint is a letdown compared to The Blueprint, then Minaj brought it on herself. However, as a breakup album that takes heartbreak (or, more specifically, the feeling of having an infinite amount of love to give to an appreciative person) in every direction possible, it provides a template worth imitating. I am and have always been a huge fan of Nicki Minaj since 2009 and especially 2010 and on.
Every/any song that involves Nicki Minaj was/is my priority and obsession to know since I was 12. Of course my family knows that I really like Nicki Minaj, and it’s no secret that Nicki can be inappropriate so I listen to her clean versions of songs. Last Christmas my big brother had purchased one of Nicki’s perfume collections for me and I was very grateful. Not only does Nicki Minaj is an American rapper, she sings, is a song writer, actress, owns her own clothing line along with perfumes/dolls/shoes and is an entrepreneur. Fun Fact, Nicki has her own dictionary called “Nictionary”. I don’t always love everything Ms. Minaj does but I still find a way to make it positive and support her because she’s human too and she inspires and motivates me so much. Onika, your Barbz and Kenz will continue to love
you!