Will the real Nicki Minaj please stand up?
thefader.comIn March 2022, Nicki Minaj sat down with Joe Budden for a wide-ranging conversation about Billboard metrics, plastic surgery, trend-chasers and more.
A little under an hour into the conversation, the topic shifts to her influence in the world of fashion. “You would think that the biggest female rapper of all time… would have been on the cover of American Vogue,” Minaj said. “But she hasn’t.” Last month Anna Wintour finally got wise and Nicki finally got her cover.
It’s a tidy microcosm for Minaj’s career more broadly, a series of ambitions manifested through faith and sweat that laid the groundwork for our current bumper crop of female rappers and sketched out one potential path for the synthesis of hip-hop and pop music in the digital music era.
When she was five years old, she prayed to become rich enough to buy her mother a house; now forty and a mother herself, Minaj has retreated from the public eye in recent years with little left to prove to anyone, even herself.
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