Nicki Minaj’s superpower is her ability to adapt. In her 16-year career, she’s been a for-the-streets mixtape queen, a chrome-pink pop star, an empowered groundbreaker, and—using her formidable theater skills—a chameleonic character rapper, morphing into personas like Harajuku Barbie, Tyrone, Chun Li, and the beloved Roman Zolanski, all with the wittiest wordplay this side of Lil Wayne.
The original Pink Friday—her first album after a string of phenomenal mixtapes in the late 2000s—shifted the industry upon its release in 2010, proving that she could weave a tapestry with her characters, sing her face off, and that sexist rap purism would be left in her dust. Nicki the Boss set records, became a global superstar, and casually shattered the male-rapper stronghold on the mainstream in a way that hadn’t been done since the heyday of Lil Kim and Foxy Brown. For all the belated recognition and chart dominance of women rappers today, it’s undeniable that Minaj was the beginning of a sea change. She was the blueprint for women rappers who didn’t have to be feminine mirrors of their male patrons, but could stand on their own.
Pink Friday 2 aims to conjure and build on that moment in time, and to remind us—her fans, her haters, her mortal enemies—what she’s done for rap, especially women in rap. Like the original, Nicki masters the art of the quick change, jumping from persona to persona, genre to genre, putting her signature cadences on drill, pop, dancehall, afrobeats, R&B, Jersey club, and trap. Yet except for a few excellent tracks and verses peeking through, this 22-song album—unlike 2018’s Queen or even 2014’s bar-setting The Pinkprint—falls apart pretty quickly. While Minaj is still rapping valiantly—especially as Red Ruby Da Sleeze, a new persona introduced on the Diwali riddim-sampling single of the same name—the album’s intention is muddled through its scattershot production, which sounds less like genre innovation and more like an insidious ploy to worm its way into as many crevices on TikTok as possible.
It didn’t have to be this way! Pink Friday 2 includes tracks about her emotional fortitude, her Trini and Caribbean pride, her unfuckwithable armor, and intimate reflections on her life. On the affecting album opener, “Are You Gone Already,” a Finneas production that samples Billie Eilish’s “when the party’s over,” she grapples with the pain of learning her father was killed by a hit-and-run driver in 2021, and reflects on her responsibility and love as a mother. She flexes her agility on tracks like “Beep Beep” and “Barbie Dangerous,” which conjure the much beloved Mixtape Nicki: the latter interpolates Biggie’s “Notorious Thugs” and includes the line, “Name a rapper that can channel Big Poppa and push out Papa Bear/Ho, I’m mother of the year.” Or on “RNB,” an otherwise middling track with Tate Kobang and Lil Wayne where she raps, “I keep his secrets/I let him beast it/Kissin’ on my thighs and my breast/He two-pieced it.” Yet on the same song, when Wayne raps, “’Bout to buy a fake booty for a real-ass bitch,” it’s an odious reminder that Minaj felt pressured to get ass shots at the beginning of her Young Money career—an example of context seeping into, and souring, the music.
One of the key problems here began with 2022’s post-“Anaconda” single “Super Freaky Girl.” The chimera of a Rick James song that was famously sampled by MC Hammer and newly manipulated by Dr. Luke and Hipgnosis was proof that mining several generations of nostalgia was a big financial win—no matter that the well-known chorus threatened to drown out Minaj’s playful sex-kitten verses. Though such a path is inevitable for many artists as mining IP becomes an increasingly big business, the choice to include clips from well-worn songs like Junior Senior’s “Move Your Feet” (on the club track “Everybody,” which is at least a grower), Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” (on “My Life”) and, least forgivably, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” a song so widely sampled it’s essentially wallpaper, paradoxically suggests a shaky belief in her own ability to create hits by her talent alone. Even the most cynical read here—profit maximization—doesn’t exactly answer why one of the most creative rappers alive would draw up such a hollow plan.
The other specter haunting the background of Pink Friday 2 is Minaj’s ostensible rivals—Cardi B, as well as all the other rap girlies who don’t properly bend the knee. Minaj is a deft and prickly battle rapper, but her sense of fun can curdle into resentment, as on “Fallin 4 U,” a shiv of a Latto diss track that includes the curiously sneering line, “These bitches gotta shake they ass to show sex appeal.” Minaj should be taking a victory lap—she is one of the most important rappers of this century—and yet she seems to feel like she has to keep reiterating her position and punching down, hitting a low point on the Waka Flocka-sampling “FTCU” when she raps, “Stay in your Tory lane, bitch, I’m not Iggy.”
It feels oddly retrograde and beneath her, particularly when, on that same track, she fires up a bar like, “Come on bitch, I just put a milli on my Richie—minus like fifty, mine was nine-fifty, sissy.” Flashes of her notorious humor emerge (“Poppin’ out like a cork/Duckin ’em like Björk” on “Needle”), but her quirkiness feels blunted across the album, like her heart isn’t in it in the same way it used to be. Perhaps it’s just a career crossroads—grief and frustration can fuel a creative plateau as frequently as it produces classic albums—but one wonders if, somehow, ascending the throne has complicated her ability to scrap. As she sings earnestly in the first few minutes of the album: “Rich, yes, but are you happy?”
