Nicki Minaj: “How Many Different People Can I F—ing Be?”

Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 04/30/2012 at 3:15 PM News

The Popdust Files: interviews, nicki minaj, the guardian

Nicki Minaj is doing more interviews than she has alter egos. They’ve ranged from insufferably phoned-in to entertaining-because-it’s-Graham-Norton to awesome. This one, from The Guardian, is the one that extended the range to awesome, mostly because Nicki cuts the politeness with real candor. You should go there and read the whole thing. First, some highlights:

Nicki Minaj hates the name Nicki Minaj.

Her real name, as you probably know, is Onika Maraj, but she goes by Nicki Minaj because some record-label person told her to. (Probably because of the pun; if you haven’t gotten it by now, take trois and think on it.) Unsurprisingly, Nicki isn’t a fan.

Nicki Minaj is perfectly fine doing pop music, thank you very much.

There’s lots of tension throughout the interview about just how many personas Nicki’s taking on to sustain her current career–see the quote in the headline–and how sexual, stylish, ballsy and/or boastful they’re allowed to be. You’d think the tension’d be especially high with her swerve toward dance-pop (“Starships,” everything on Roman Reloaded after “Starships”), but you’d be wrong. At least that’s Nicki’s story so far:

People always want to talk about who I was, but I’ve always been singing, always been experimenting with pop music. So the fact that it got huge one day, should I apologise for that? Should I apologise that Starships and Super Bass did well, and children like them, and Middle America can sing along?

Speaking of Nicki being unapologetic…

Stop fucking telling her to stop swearing.

Any interview where the interviewer says “she blows up” is probably going to be pretty good, as is any interview where someone actively dumps on crappy older interviews and has a point. Nicki Minaj has an excellent point:

Why do people ask me to lose swear words? Do people ask Eminem to lose swear words? Do they ask Lil Wayne to lose swear words? I did an interview the other day and when I saw it back I’m like, why the hell did she make the interview all about some goddamned kids? It was crazy. Five-year-old children shouldn’t be the subject of a Nicki Minaj interview.

If only the world abided by that last point. Granted, this bit’s kind of undermined by the subhead reading “She has a body like Marilyn and a mouth like Eminem. No wonder Nicki Minaj is the hottest female rapper in the world,” but somebody other than the interviewer usually writes those. Nicki certainly didn’t. We’d like to imagine her response goes something like this:

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