Album Review: Nicki Minaj, Queen

Nicki Minaj has been all over the internet lately, for reasons largely peripheral to her fourth album. Her mission, it appears, has been to remind us that, in addition to her chops as rapper and singer, she is a one-person controversy machine, for whom social media is less a means of communicating with the masses than a virtual flame-thrower to be aimed at naysayers, haters, detractors etc – which, from Minaj’s perspective, would seem to encompass a significant chunk of humanity (if you’re not on team Nicki, you’re fair game).

Second only to Kanye in her ‘will she? / won’t she?’ stance on release dates, she had surprise-announced the arrival of Queen on her Beats One show, then retroactively added ‘Fefe’, a hook-up with controversial rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine. The latter was regarded as an attempt by Minaj to juice streaming figures for Queen, after the record was relegated to second place on the Billboard Hot 100 by Travis Scott.

That was just the beginning. Shortly afterwards she took to Twitter to accuse everyone – from Spotify to her label, Republic, to Scott himself (who had bundled 50,000 units of his album with concert ticket sales) – of cheating her out of her rightful No.1 spot. Minaj also cancelled her co-headline tour of the US with Future, amid rumour of less than stellar box office (the European leg, including a Dublin 3Arena date in March 2019, goes ahead).

With such a firestorm swirling, it’d be easy to lose sight of the fact that Queen is her most impressive collection to date – a showcase for both her bareknuckle rhyming, and also for her old-school pop chops. She recasts the Notorious B.I.G’s ‘Just Playing (Dreams)’ on ‘Barbie Dreams’, swapping out his minsogynst lyrics (“R&B b*****”) for MeToo appropriate barbs (wherein she describes Drake as a “wet” crybaby).

Minaj meanwhile demonstrates a mastery of epic pop with single ‘Ganja Burns’, where she takes aim at an unidentified enemy – reputed to be Cardi B – over a lilting reggae beat (“You made one dope beat, now you Kanye? / You got a nigga named Jay, now you ‘Yoncé?”).

That track really is Queen in a nutshell – catchy, provocative, fixated on Minaj’s position in the hip hop power-rankings. It’s a shame, in a way, she’s so obsessed with her place on the leaderboard, as it’s when she stops blustering that the project really takes flight, as demonstrated by the lilting Ariana Grande hook-up ‘Bed’ and Eminem collaboration ‘Majesty’. The curious question the album ultimately raises is this: where – and who – would Nicki Minaj be without her rage? The only one who can answer that, in the long run, is Nicki.

7/10