A MF MONSTER

Thoughts on MAGA Minaj from a Barb in recovery

Thank you for the mun-mun-muny, the yen and the pesos. They make my writing possible.

What can I say of the poet? She moved me. Love for a poet resists justification like a canyon resists being captured by an iPhone camera. There’s a fugitive hugeness.

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“Nicki Minaj is a small woman,” I thought, watching her take the stage with Erika Kirk on the latter’s umpteenth leg of her bedazzled Grief Tour. Like many celebrities, Nicki Minaj is tiny. Stardom doesn’t gel with human anatomy, with bones and fat.¹ She’d been flirting with open Trump support for weeks, even appearing at a U.N. event to bolster the Administration’s claims of Christian persecution in Nigeria. A month later, the U.S. would conduct an airstrike on the northwestern region of the country. Starships were meant to fly.

Nicki’s embrace of MAGA defies the beleaguered conventional wisdom of racialized American politics. She’s a Black woman, an immigrant, an entertainer. Not traditionally Republican demographics. Mar a Lago recently settled for Vanilla Ice as the main act for its New Year’s Eve party. All this ought to be hard to square. Not for me. I was, for many years, a Barb.

To define a Barb as a fan of Nicki Minaj is to oversimplify matters, to miss the point. I was Nicki Minaj. In the breast of every Barb rests this certainty, even if few would articulate it this way. To be a Barb is something related to, but other than, enjoying the music of Nicki Minaj. Enjoying the music is something I often forgot to do entirely. To be a Barb is to tap into a Lovecraftian, demiurgic force that’s ultimately indifferent to its devotees, and to Onika Tanya Maraj herself.

Some might call this a hallucination induced by modern fandom, an effect of the parasocial phenomenon that’s been observed ad nauseam. This is not that. Even the lay person understands that the Barbz (Barbies, fans of Nicki Minaj, Nicki Lewinsky, Nicki the Harajuku Barbie) differ in character from other fandoms. Barbz are the last fandom you want to square off against. A Barb enters the digital arena with nothing to lose.² Of course they do. A Barb is accustomed to deputizing themselves to an outside entity. We call that entity Nicki Minaj, but Barb scholars know it’s not her. It’s Something Else. Even the name “Minaj” implies a third presence.

A Barb can come from any walk of life. I’d prefer not to disclose how I know, but there are Barbz in the upper echelons of our military. There are Barbz at this very moment striding across the halls of power in D.C. in a suit and tie, mentally wearing a pink bob. Charlie Kirk was a Barb. Once you’ve entered the flow state induced by Nicki Minaj’s discography, it’s over. You are her son, like an episode of Maury, like an episode of E.R., bitch I’m hotter than the D.R. The crazy thing is that, if you listen, if you listen, a terrifying truth becomes clear: Nicki, too, is a mere vassal.

Time and again, a theme of demonic possession emerges in Nicki’s oeuvre. Run it back. Before she had a priest perform an exorcism on her at the Grammys, before she claimed to have a gay man living inside her named Roman Zolanski, before I am not Jasmine, I am Aladdin, all the way back to her debut mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty, Nicki was claiming to have voices in her head. “You know they say who, who is Nicki Minaj?” she opens in the title track. “You know I’m like a multiple personality bitch.”

Possession isn’t just a theme. It’s the entire point. Now is a good time to ask: What is Nicki the Human’s point of view? Beyond bog-standard braggadocio, there isn’t one. The clearest thesis statement is found in the Pink Friday opener, “I’m the Best.” P.O.V. isn’t her power. It’s style. It’s voice. It’s tongues. It’s being a conduit.

“UH!”

The trademark opener of her verses. The Barb snaps to attention when they hear it. The Entity is speaking now. The high priestess’ eyes roll to the back of her head: “I just came up in it a little bit self-centered but did I kill a Queen? Now Alexander McQueen’s got the wrists on glow the bottles is on po’ got that shimmy shimmy ya, shimmy ya, shimmy yo.”

Her best verses arrive as instant intrusive thoughts. Unique to Barb culture are the fit-like convulsions that have lyrics flying involuntarily from the mouth. Such fits can be, and often are, accompanied by a sudden jerk of the torso, by hands flying to cocked hips, by the head snapping sideways to deliver lines like “Haters you can kill yourselves! OH…” It’s a full-body occupation.

If the Barb were to be honest with themselves, this is what you show up to Nicki Minaj for. It’s something she only sometimes delivers. The most reliable wellspring is her guest verses: “Bottoms Up” (Trey Songz), “Dip” (Tyga), “Dance (A$$)” (Big Sean). These verses are Barb canon. Her pop songs? Shrewd moves to broaden her audience. Nothing in them approaches “Tuck yourself in, you better hold onto your teddy! It’s Nightmare on Elm Street and guess who’s playin’ Freddy!”

Then there’s her magnum opus, her guest verse in Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: “Monster.” I know these lyrics better than I know the National Anthem. “Pull up in the monster automobile gangsta with a bad bitch that came from Sri Lanka yeah I’m in that Tonka color of Willy Wonka you can be the king but watch the queen conquer.”

Heightening the dominance pageant is the fact that two male titans of rap, Jay-Z and Kanye, are decapitated in the process. To this day, Jay-Z’s verse is something of a punchline.³ “Love! I don’t get enough of it.” It’s the squirt water gun to Nicki’s atomic warhead.

The music video⁴ is a visual distillation of Nicki’s central themes: she, in a white dress and pink wig, is being held hostage in a dungeon, tied to a chair, taunted by another Nicki with fangs, dressed in black. The verse oscillates between the dueling personas, between the bratty Barbie and the sadistic Roman. Control vs. Chaos. Superego vs. Id. Roman covers Nicki’s head with a bag, victorious id shrieking out of her flesh: “I’M A MOTHERFUCKING MONSTER!”

The Barbz having the “Monster” verse was handy. It gave us something to point to as proof of her singular talent, absolving us of the more difficult task of having to explain what it was, exactly, about Nicki that compelled us so. Such virtuosity could have only come to us in the form of a feature. Features bring out the best in her. She gets out of her own way, lets the flow do what it needs.

If features have Nicki at her supernatural best, her albums are her at her worst, her most human. These often bloated projects are padded with indulgent victory laps (“Iconic trio on ‘Monster,’” she brags in Queen’s “LLC,” referencing a song that was, at that point, eight years old) and saccharine duds like “Marilyn Monroe,” the audio equivalent of an aunt posting “Live, Laugh, Love” on Facebook.

I know from listening to every last minute of “Queen Radio,” Nicki’s broadcast show that sounded like state propaganda under an Oppression Pink⁵ regime, that Nicki’s favorite tracks are her worst. She has terrible taste in her own output. She loves her sappy confessional songs like “Grand Piano” and “Come See About Me,” while her hits have to be brought to her attention. “Super Bass,” the smash from her debut album, was famously destined for bonus track material before Taylor Swift, whose third eye is trained to detect micro-movements of capitalism invisible to most, blew it up.

Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, which gave us “Starships,” was originally an exploration of her alter ego, a chaotic gay boy whose British mum (Martha) sent him to conversion therapy in Moscow⁶. Perhaps no one would blame her for going a different direction, but it does reveal a pattern. She takes a risk, then chickens out halfway through. The title Pink Friday was slapped onto Roman Reloaded as a sort of “just kidding!” She doesn’t trust her own instincts.

Few artists have so publicly struggled with their gift like Nicki Minaj. A decent chunk of her body of work amounts to an attempt on her part to provide evidence of its vast scope. She’s obsessed with stats, numbers, awards. “We made the biggest impact, check the spreadsheet,” she urges us in “Barbie Tingz,” marking the rare appearance of a spreadsheet in a rap song (itself a lead single that she released, then scrapped, then relegated to a Target bonus track)⁷.

That album, Queen, is Nicki at her smallest and most paranoid. At its core, it’s a response to the rise of Cardi B, the first insurgent to be considered a legitimate threat. Feeling threatened undid Nicki. Like Trump, she prefers asymmetrical warfare. Barbz might recall her old favorite target of subliminal disses, the rapper Keys, who was dismissed anonymously in the lyric, “You might get addressed in the next al-BUM” in Pink Friday. None of that self-sure haughtiness makes it to Queen, which sounds more like a mad monarch repeatedly screaming “Off with her head!” to a citizenry thoroughly bullied into loyalty.

Monarchy, alongside demonic possession, is the other major motif in her work. They’re foils. The Shrine Maiden vs. the Empress. Royalty, its riches and imperial accoutrements, is a hiphop regular. But with Nicki, it’s beyond jewels and crowns. The laundry list of accolades reveals a desire to capture her gift, to make it tangible, to reduce it to a blunt object she can brandish to put down foes real and imagined.

But talent is stubborn. It has needs of its own, and those needs don’t always, or even usually, align with our petty desires. The tragedy of Nicki Minaj lives in this interplay between a superior alien and its ordinary vessel, between the thing that makes her great, and the dull chore she wants it to perform.

It’s the common mistake of talented people to believe it’s they who possess the talent and not the other way around. Talent is a tenant that collects rent. I don’t say this to undercut her abilities. It’s the opposite: She is talent incarnate, manifestly representative of its boons and its Faustian bargain. Talent reduces you to a host. Your best stuff visits you while you fumble haplessly for pen and paper to take dictation. Your worst stuff? It’s when you try too hard. When you interfere. It’s a cruel arrangement. You are a secretary at best, a captive at worst.

It’s the tragedy in Black Swan and Boogie Nights and Amadeus: Talent would gladly leave you with nothing in pursuit of expressing itself. Great artists learn to work alongside it, to meet its demands, to trust instinct, the language it speaks in. It requires humility. These are unacceptable terms for Nicki Minaj, who’s been trying to bring her gift to heel for years, to force it to pump out baroque testaments to her superiority when what it clearly wants to do is have fun.⁸

We could touch on her personal life, which is a haunted house of malevolent entities like Tekashi 6ix9ine and her husband.⁹ We could bring up Pink Friday 2, which sounds like an AI-generated version of Pink Friday, or her obsession with generative AI. She obviously loves it: it churns out instant visual testaments to her greatness, objects with value only to her and her most sycophantic fans. There’s the "my cousin’s friend took the vaccine and it made him impotent” swollen balls thing. But it all feels downstream of this: Nicki Minaj is a talented, hollow person.

It makes sense that she finds herself in the thrall of MAGAism, a movement that, discounting the obvious superficial qualities, in many ways resembles her: vacuous, blustering, obsessed with dominance. If there’s an inverse of her “Monster” verse, it’s her taking the stage with Erika Kirk. If “Monster” was the triumph of the raw gift, her MAGA turn is the triumph of Nicki the Person, Nicki the Husk, Nicki the Mouthpiece, Nicki the Petty Reactionary; easily wounded, easily impressed, seeking only praise and admiration.

Some have questioned why a star with such a diverse fanbase would align herself with Trump. What are the career advantages? Is it a calculated gamble on a culturally ascendant conservatism? Probably not. The most likely thing is that MAGA simply presents a worldview she prefers, a world where the winners and the losers are entirely obvious. It must be a comforting thought to a woman who’s highly successful, yet wildly insecure; a woman who sees the arts as just another medium to express power. It’s not that complicated. She likes winners, and she likes people who like her. Right now, that’s MAGA.

I will die a Barb. It’s sad, but it’s not up to me. It’s an incurable condition. Decades from now, I could be in a medically induced coma, could by all rights be a vegetable, but if someone were to whisper “Could I get that coke, could I get that Henny?” into my ear, my eyes would flutter open and I would bolt upright and say, “Could I get salt around that rim-rim-rim-rim?”

I’d like to say I’m disappointed. But I’m not, really. This is the Nicki I’ve known all along. It always felt like, even at her height, she was a small woman with something huge moving through her. The insane closeness I felt with her was certainly part of that. It felt like it was moving through me, too. A great artist can do that. A great artist can be a bridge between higher, grander sentiments and an ordinary person.¹⁰

But Nicki has always been more interested in the “great” part than the “artist” part. In MAGA, she’s found throngs of people, starving for mainstream entertainers of their own, who will heap all the approval she could ask for upon her. Still, I doubt this will satisfy her. Nicki Minaj is not a content person, and as much as she may wish it weren’t so, artistic success and material success are distinct.

She is, in the end, a very talented person. And per the terms of talent, you never really arrive. You can only reach. It’s a humbling dynamic. But, hey. This is what you live for.

AHHHHHHH!!!!

1. Not to diminish, however, how charming she can be IRL. Her accidentally calling J.D. Vance an “assassin” in front of the widowed Kirk was… inspired.

2. A Barb historian might note that contributions of Barb culture to Twitter culture. Barbz were forged in iconoclasm: the rise of Twitter coincided with the Nicki vs. Lil Kim beef, a vicious, virtual battle that saw the young pink-wigged upstart fell a rap legend. At least, that’s how it felt all the time.

3. “That to do list ass verse” — an anonymous source.

4. The video was nearly scrapped, then leaked, then released by an irritated Kanye, who already, if Nicki is to be believed, had to be convinced to put the song out in the first place.

5. Move over, Cloud Dancer!

6. The teaser song “Roman in Moscow” contains the lyrics “I’m a racist, I’m a bigot / bitch, I’m thicker than a midget” if that’s of any interest to you.

7. Bonus tracks are her way of saying “Hahaha I wasn’t being serious! Unless…”

8. I ask that you recall here the conversion therapy narrative she dreamt up for Roman.

9. All I will say is that “Petty” being appended to her last name is a point in favor of intelligent design.

10. I’m pretty convinced that this is the only kind of person there is.