Pink Friday 2
Nicki Minaj: First studio album in five years
Nicki Minaj is considered a perfectionist. photo
© Charles Sykes/Invision/AP/dpa
Nicki Minaj’s music moves between pop and hip-hop, and she is now releasing her first album in five years. Your opinion: all hits.
In 2021, Minaj made headlines with statements that “a cousin’s friend” had become impotent due to the corona vaccination – even the Ministry of Health in her native state of Trinidad and Tobago criticized her for unscientific vaccine skepticism. To this day, she shrugs her shoulders in the face of such criticism and explains that she likes to form her own opinion.
Always delays
From Friday (December 8th) onwards, Minaj will finally be about music again. Then “Pink Friday 2” is released, just in time for the band’s 41st birthday and it is the first studio album in five years. The release had been delayed again and again, but now Minaj is sure: the sequel to her 2010 hit “Pink Friday” has been extremely successful. You can move your hips to at least ten songs, she wrote on the short message service X.
In the end, she picked the track list for the album from around 60 songs, a collaboration with the Canadian superstar Drake has already been announced and there is also supposed to be a world tour. A week ago, she showed her 228 million fans on Instagram the bottle of the perfume for the album, available at the US department store chain JC Penney.
Technicians can sing a song
The rapper and songwriter is considered a perfectionist: there are said to have been 27 versions of her hit “Anaconda” nine years ago until she was satisfied and she has a reputation for demanding a lot from the technicians in the studio.
In a cover story published just in time for the album’s release in November, she revealed to the fashion magazine “Vogue” that she was “a little special”. “Sometimes there are things that the best sound engineer in the world doesn’t hear. I hear them,” Minaj explained. “And you know what? I’m always right.”
There are already two pre-release singles. “Super Freaky Girl” initially brought Minaj back into rap territory in August and gave her a number 1 hit on the US Billboard charts. Those in the audience who were still on bubblegum after the 2010 megahit “Starships”, the accessible “Anaconda” or the summer cover “Barbie Girl”, which she released with rapper Ice Spice and the original band Aqua, must have been disappointed. Pop hoped.
The second track, “Last Time I Saw You”, was more stripped down at the beginning of September and had melancholic lyrics about a breakup. “It’s a song about guilt,” Minaj told Vogue. “I don’t think people make enough music about the experience of guilt. But if you talk to any human being in the world about it, they’ll know exactly what you mean.”
Such statements seem more rested than is usual in the rap business, but in the days before the release of “Pink Friday 2” the genre’s usual fluff is back. “An ingenious, iconic, thought-provoking, beautiful work,” Minaj wrote on