Feedback | The Anaconda in the Room: How Nicki Minaj Fuses Style & Substance

Austin Ryan



Oh man have I learned to love Nicki Minaj. Pop never sunk its hooks deep into my musical sensibilities, but I cannot resist a lightning rod like Nicki Minaj. Convinced by boredom and an odd itch, I tried to quantify the raw rage over Nicki Minaj. I did so by calculating the percentage of dislikes from the ten most watched YouTube videos from a few big pop figures. After that I calculated the mean of the percentages to get an average “percentage disliked‰” for a pop star‰’s big videos. Minaj‰’s videos total at 20.9 percent disliked on average.

Normal pop stars like Will.i.am or Katy Perry average 9 percent dislikes on their top ten Youtube hits. But most pop stars do not make statements like Minaj does. So I took a look at Lady Gaga, an artist I felt similarly stirred up ire with liberal statements and exotic dress. Gaga‰’s videos average at about 13.2 percent. At this point I just wanted one artist that would beat Minaj‰’s figures. Justin Bieber managed that, his average video having 28.1 percent dislikes.

The metric can only imperfectly gauge distaste. A person could have multiple YouTube accounts. Heavily disliked outliers like Nicki Minaj‰’s skew the averages upward. YouTube does not necessarily speak to a general audience either, though the sheer number of accounts casting shade makes for a good sample size. Limitations aside, Nicki numerically faces more haters than even equivalent artists in her field. Perhaps her aggressive style and fluctuation between alter egos proved too much to handle.

However, style alone does not explain the anger away. For some, Minaj presents a real challenge to their morals and standards. Minaj ends up at the sticking end of arguments over the respectability of women, which paint her as a menace validating immoral behavior. Yet, moral crusaders level that argument at nearly every single relevant female pop star. So what does Minaj do that so incenses people?

She angers people with a post-modern pop that shapes the structure of her songs to their message. Normally, if a popular artist creates a song with annoying lyrics, a catchy beat could patch the issue up. For example, when I listen to Will.i.am‰’s “The.Hardest.Ever.‰” some lyrics like “I woke up hard like morning wood in the morning‰” annoy me with their silliness. The aggressively up-tempo and happy beat keeps me riding along anyways.

Minaj does something almost post-modern by matching style and structure to soul. So if you dislike her it is easy to dislike everything about her, but if you love her it is easy to love everything about her.

Anaconda serves as an excellent example. The song goes over two verses, both containing a story about sex. The song celebrates both the fun and the power behind her sexual exploits in style and lyrics.

Lines like “So I pulled up in the jag, Mayweather with the jab like, dun-du-du-dun-dun-du-du-dun-dun‰” that directly compares seduction to sparring match sex and power. Lines like “gun in my purse, bitch I came dressed to kill‰” enforce that point. Minaj matches her style to her lyrics by speaking sweetly at first but escalating into the forceful style of rapping people know her for. By the end Nicki Minaj starts growling and calling out the skinny girls in the club.

Minaj brings the same meaning to the video, when she enters dressed as a French maid, and sprays whip cream across her breasts and starts pantomiming oral sex with a banana. However, just a moment later she casually cuts the banana and tosses it aside with a snarl. The video culminates with Minaj twerking all over Drake, but as soon as the famous rapper tries to lay a hand, she slaps it aside and walks away.

The visual symbols for pleasure abound as well, with Minaj often slapping asses and making ecstatic facial expressions. The verses come interlaced with small, but clearly sexual “unfs‰” and “ohs.‰” In both verses Minaj describes getting oral sex, something pleasurable primarily for her. She matches the visceral lyrics and symbols with the structure of the song. The song ramps up slowly at first, then spikes in intensity and becomes frenetically energetic before exploding into a hot burst of sound. If that sounds sexual, it‰’s because it is.

If the incredibly heavy sexuality of the song‰’s video offends you for any reason, then so will the lyrics and the structure of the song itself. If you dislike Minaj‰’s strange vocal styling or lyrical content, you‰’ll dislike the music video and song structure made to match it. Pick one thing to dislike, and get two for free. Minaj is running a fire sale on outrage.

And the pattern of putting style and structure to video and lyrics continues. Check out the strange symbols in her new single “Only‰” and you will find endless metaphors for authority that speaks for itself. The style and the lyrics back that up just as much. Head over to “Super Bass‰” and you‰’ll see a video that switches images as Minaj goes from cutesy crushing to a more monogamous pining to match lyrics that describe Minaj entering into a more serious relationship.

I do not believe Minaj‰’s hyper technicolor antics, often aggressive lyrics and sexual grandstanding alone earn her such controversy. Pop starts do not refrain from the flamboyant when reaching out to audiences desensitized by onslaughts of Old Spice ads. 

With Minaj, if the video offends, likely so will everything else about what she does. However, Minaj‰’s fusion of style and substance makes her easy to love, as well as hate. Her brand branching out to perfumes and clothes, her raps featured all across the rap world, and her albums selling beyond well say as much.