Nicki Minaj: ‘I am doing everything the boys can – plus more…’

Nicki Minaj is not simply the hottest name in rap, she’s a multifaceted artist who’ll win women a place at the heart of hip-hop, as she tells Hermione Hoby

Name any current hip-hop artist and the chances are that 25-year-old Nicki Minaj, a woman repeatedly hailed as the future of female rap, has worked with them. Among her countless collaborators is Kanye West, a man so in awe that he’s described her as “the scariest artist right now.” She lent a now-celebrated rap to his track “Monster” which included the brilliant boast that she commands “50k for a verse no album out!” Now though, finally, her debut is out: Pink Friday has been so hyped and so long awaited that its release last week reached that curious status of an “event”.

As I wait to meet her at her label’s New York office, there are at least six people engaged in frantic preparations. One is tasked with fetching drinks (“Not soda — juice!”). Another runs in bearing an icebox for the juice-not-soda. Someone else is on the phone urgently trying to sort out some honey. When the lady herself arrives, she’s flanked by about 11 people and I’m kicked out until 15 minutes later the door is reopened by a woman filled with all the bonhomie of a prison warden. She jerks her head inside: “You ready?”

Inside, a petite and pinkified Minaj is perched in an armchair clutching a cup of tea. She’s well wrapped up against a New York November but out from the swaddled layers peek two fluoro-fuchsia legs that end in silver stacked heels. Before moving to the borough of Queens at the age of five, she lived with her grandmother in Trinidad and Tobago, but now she speaks in a voice as honeyed as the tea she’s sipping and keeps clearing her throat, a dainty little mannerism indicating a diva’s concern for her pipes.

When I ask what it is about her that she thinks has got people so excited she answers immediately: “Daring to smile and have fun again in hip-hop.” She goes on, warming: “Fresh, new, different, exciting… pink! Euphoria! Saying, you know what, this may be the most hideous outfit that you’ve ever seen but I don’t care and I’m gonna wear it. People enjoy theatrics, they want a show, they want to be entertained.”

And entertain she does. It’s not often that a serious hip-hop artist makes you laugh, but Minaj’s flourishes of operatic vibrato and her cartoonish, wide-eyed performance style are hilarious. But the excitement surrounding her album is also, no doubt, down to a paucity of young female MCs. That she should be both enormously talented as well as original and funny goes some way to explaining the Pink Friday mania.

The first track on the album is called “I’m the Best” and, as opening salvos go, it’s a pretty irrefutable claim. On it, she raps: “I’m fighting for the girls that never thought they could win” and: “I am here to reverse the curse that they lived in.” Minaj is fully aware that “a lot is riding on this album”.

“I realise that when this album does well there are doors that will be kicked open for female rappers immediately. I always wanted to be someone who spearheaded a movement, not just did something that worked for me. I want to get girls excited about being female rappers again and knowing that they can be kooky, goofy, playful, serious, hardcore – whatever it is, but you have the choice now.”

Does she think hip-hop is still a man’s world? She takes a huge breath and then lets out a long sigh.

“I just want to be so careful in the way that I answer that question.” She pauses. “I mean, statistically, maybe yes. But realistically, no. I feel that I am doing everything the boys can and have done, plus more. And so if I go ahead and say, ‘Yeah, it’s man’s world’, I feel like I would make young girls feel like, ‘Oh God, well Nicki even said it’s a man’s world.’ No, no: it’s a leader’s world. Doesn’t matter if you’re a man or woman.”

She does concede, though, that female MCs have been, “a little lost for a few years. We just had to get back our footing, get back our confidence. Female rappers tend to have a lower self-esteem and they don’t believe in themselves as much as they should.”

Such sisterliness isn’t felt by all parties. Recently, a video surfaced of her peer Lil’ Kim performing in a club, declaring: “I will erase this bitch’s social security number… I’d kill that bitch with my old shit.” It’s assumed that she was responding to Minaj’s track “Roman’s Revenge”, a formidable and foul-mouthed collaboration with Eminem, in which Minaj spits the inimitable lines: “Word, that bitch mad ’cause I took the spot?/ Well, bitch, if you ain’t shittin’, then get off the pot.”

“Roman’s a little gay boy who lives in me. And every time I talk he sort of just appears and I tell him, ‘Roman, you know, stop it, you’ve gone mad, I tell you, mad.’ He’s an outlet to say what I need to say but sometimes don’t want to.” Sure enough, the track ends with Nicki-as-Roman’s mother, crying: “Stop it! Stop it!” and: “Wash your mouth out with soap, boys”, a deft little feint towards self-censorship.

Now Minaj is on an alter-ego roll: “Then there’s Barbie,” she says, in a tiny, breathy voice. This, to honour her with her full name, is Harajuku Barbie; the epithet refers to the playful street fashions found around Harajuku station in Tokyo to which Minaj, with her pink-dipped, bright blond hair, seems indebted.

“She’s innocent,” explains Minaj-as-Barbie. “She lives in a fantasy land and she plays dress up. And she’s really cutesy. And, you know, you can’t be mad at her because she’s sweet.”

She has previously said that she adopted these fantasy identities to escape the sound of her parents fighting: according to Minaj, her father drank, took drugs and once tried to kill her mother by setting the house on fire. Snapping into a tougher twang now, she says: ” Then you have Nicki who’s straight out of the streets of Southside Jamaica, Queens, New York City, who has been working on her craft for seven, eight, nine years and is now ready to rule the world.”

Minaj has already created a whole world, though. Her online Nictionary will tell you, for example, that “Alfred Bitchcock” is “a term of endearment from one bitchy Harajuku Barbie to another”, while a “Strawberry Shortcake” is “one who loses sight of her goals and her CAKE by focusing on BEEF and negativity”.

It’s funny and engaging, but the point is that the idiolect and alter egos seem to keep her balanced as the pressure of her burgeoning fame builds. “They keep each other from being suicidal at times,” she says. “And I hate to use that term loosely, but… you can tell people, ‘Don’t kill yourself, don’t be weak’, but until you walk a day in someone’s shoes you don’t know what that real pressure is. We’re human. I create personalities to get through the day. It’s like a defence mechanism for me so I don’t have to deal with everything.”

One of the things Minaj has had to deal with is that wearisome question of image. When she first started putting out mixtapes (the first was 2007’s “Playtime Is Over”), most photoshoots she did were overtly sexual.

“But recently,” as she says, “I’ve switched it up and just tried to show people a whole different bunch of sides to me. I would be lying if I said I don’t like to look sexy. But then there are some days when I don’t want to look or feel sexy. So it just plays into how women are so multifaceted. Men don’t understand that because they wake up and they’re the same person unless you’re a KenBarb [a Nikki-ism for a gay guy] and you can understand the girls.

“All the leading women in pop and R&B are usually beautiful women wearing tiny outfits so if someone says, ‘I don’t feel the pressure’, it’s probably not true. But it’s weird because I feel most comfortable when I’m covered up. I think that’s the biggest misconception – that in order for me to be sexy I have to make sure my boobs are out.”

Before I’m ushered away Minaj says: “I’m not superhuman. I go through what the girls go through; I cry and I scream and I huff and I puff and I blow the house down but eventually, it’s just like a voice inside of me says, ‘Bitch! You ain’t done yet!’ You know?”

Superhuman – perhaps not. But superstar – most certainly. And she ain’t done yet