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November 24th 2014 will see Nicki Minaj unleash the beast that is ‘The Pinkprint’ , her hotly anticipated third studio album.
Now tasked with battling Beyonce and ‘Murda Bizness’ beauty Iggy Azalea for the #1 spot, Minaj took to ‘GQ’ to arm her campaign with a fresh pair of promotional legs, catching up with the publication to answer questions on her ever-growing brand.
What she revealed?
Bits and pieces from the ‘Pills N Potions’ time with the mag below…
Excerpts from her interview read:
In the “Anaconda” video, there are no fewer than five products placed prominently for advertising: her Beats by Dre speakers imprint and her Moscato but also a Victoria’s Secret bra, some Air Jordans, and a baffling “teatox” drink called MateFit (dialysis machine sold separately). It’s not exactly seamless integration, and at times it is so overt that it feels like a comment on the culture of branding, maybe some poignant thought about sex and consumerism?
Nope. “My management team has a division that has a guy that his main focus is to go out there and find new brands for me to do business with or to find brands that would like to be in our videos and contribute to our budget,” she says. It’s like a Kickstarter, but for a multi-millionaire.
She came to prominence in outsize, italic, caps-lock, Technicolor exaggeration—pink wigs, outrageous outfits, eyelashes that were a comment about eyelashes. She had different personas—alter egos, she called them—with names and backstories. She did funny accents and was willing to make herself beautiful, then grotesque, then absurd, then back again. And here she is now, demure by comparison, just plain old black extensions, just a T-shirt about carbon.
“I always thought that by the time I put out a third album, I would want to come back to natural hair and natural makeup,” she told me. “I thought, I will shock the world again and just be more toned down. I thought that would be more shocking than to keep on doing exactly what they had already seen.”
She no longer feels as if she needs to hide behind outrageousness. This next chapter is about success. Nicki Minaj is rap’s first and only female mogul, having parlayed all your ogling into a spot on Forbes’s Cash Kings list—the only person of our gender paid well enough to be so honored. She is the top-charting woman in rap, a top-charting rapper in general, and a crossover phenomenon who can go back and forth between hip-hop and pop the way Taylor Swift can no longer go back and forth between country and pop.
Okay, the “Anaconda” cover art, then. It was almost an afterthought, she says, the product of a photo shoot on the day that the “Anaconda” video was shot. “I just said I’ll put it out, never thought in a billion years that people would be putting [other] people’s heads on it. It’s the craziest shit.” I tell her that online I’d seen it as a rocket, jet fuel and fire being released from her undercarriage. “What hasn’t it been?” she says. “They’ve made it everything.”
You heard it here first. “Anaconda” is about a snake, and also about a woman’s ex-boyfriends, and the video is just one big slumber party. You can release a record cover into the atmosphere that makes all who see it so shocked and discomforted that their only way to metabolize it is to turn it into the world’s fastest-spreading meme, to the point where her squatting form ends up on a polo shirt, right where the little crocodile usually goes. You can do all this, and still you can look someone in the eye and say that it’s not cynical in the least, that it’s not a comment on gender or sex or the culture or anything. Double shrug. These are not the droids you’re looking for.
“I don’t know what there is to really talk about,” she says. “I’m being serious. I just see the video as being a normal video.”
We are winding down, because it’s time for Nicki to go rehearse. For this performance, she has incorporated male dancers. “I went in yesterday, finally saw the dance for the first time, and I saw the guys doing all this sexy stuff that I wasn’t a part of. And I said, ‘Hello, why aren’t they humping me on the stage?’ ” The choreographer didn’t realize that this was something she might want. She does: “We’ve got to give them something to talk about again.”