It was inevitable, here deep in the Year of the Cursed Album Rollout, that the unveiling of Nicki Minaj’s Queen would be calamitous. Kanye West tried to kill summer 2018 before it even began and settled for holding the entire month of June at gunpoint. The interminable run-up to Drake’s Scorpion devolved into the worst belated birth announcement of all time. Even Jay-Z and Beyoncé, who invaded the Louvre and surprise-dropped Everything Is Love on Tidal with their usual NDA-driven tactical precision, blinked in the face of modern music-biz reality, put the record on Spotify and Apple Music 48 hours later, and still lost the no. 1 spot on Billboard’s album chart to an Australian boy band. Verily, this is the cruelest summer.
It’s Minaj’s turn to be so mad that she’s actually laughing, which in her case involves her actually saying, “I’m actually laughing.” Over the weekend, it emerged that Queen, her fourth studio album, would also fail to top the Billboard 200, debuting at no. 2 behind Travis Scott’s narcotized mini-monolith Astroworld, already in its second week. She took this news poorly.
Specifically, she objected to Scott bundling Astroworld with tickets to his upcoming tour, then getting his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner, to advertise that bundle on Instagram while conspicuously name-dropping the couple’s 6-month-old daughter, Stormi. Minaj also called out Spotify for threatening to “punish” her as retaliation for debuting Queen too early on her new Beats 1 radio show over at Apple Music, and alleged that her label, Republic Records, backed down from that fight out of fear that fellow Republic artist Ariana Grande’s numbers might be sabotaged, too. (In a statement given to Variety, Spotify denied Minaj’s allegations, adding, “The company continues to be big fans of Nicki.”) It was quite the tweetstorm, down to the dramatic this-isn’t-a-tweetstorm conclusion.
Minaj has a point — several points, in fact. The ticket-bundling ploy is an irritating Billboard lifehack lately abused by everyone from Bon Jovi to Kenny Chesney, Taylor Swift to Metallica. Given the music industry’s general scuzziness, there are no pure and unassailable Good Old Days when it comes to chart tabulation. But this dark new streaming era of complex album-equivalent formulas has left us taking Billboard’s word at taking the algorithm’s word at taking Spotify’s word for it, and the all-Drake-everywhere fiasco was indeed a chilling look at our dystopian present. The new system sucks, even if it is “accurate.”
On the other hand, you can only spin even Travis agrees that I’m the REAL no. 1 so far.
That capitalized “AMERICA!” really hurts. I’d hate to tell you who it reminds me of. Minaj’s struggles in 2018 put her in excellent company. But they’ve also put her in a hell of a bind, and Queen itself is likely too dense and exhausting to break her out of it.
To be clear, some of Minaj’s gravest recent errors have been unforced. In June, she responded to a mildly critical tweet from a fan and freelance music writer named Wanna Thompson with a series of vitriolic DMs, which when publicized triggered a further avalanche of abuse from the Barbz, Minaj’s fearsome army of online superfans. That same month, in a cover story for Elle, the author of “Beez in the Trap” bemoaned trap music’s outsized influence on modern rap, and the author of “I Endorse These Strippers” likened many strippers and Instagram celebrities to “modern-day prostitutes.” One can interpret these as earnestly if awkwardly evolving positions, the product of the very growth and reflection that Thompson’s fateful tweet had requested from Minaj. (“She’s touching 40 soon, a new direction is needed.”) But Queen’s slight early singles didn’t much push things forward.
Which is to say that the moody “Chun-Li” mostly inspired arguments about whether the Street Fighter II character was a formidable villain or just a cop, and the hookless “Barbie Tingz” is now available as a bonus track if you buy Queen at Target. Minaj’s song called “Rich Sex” is not as good as Future’s song called “Rich $ex,” even though hers got Lil Wayne involved. (Especially because hers got Lil Wayne involved.) “FEFE,” a lurid collaboration with 6ix9ine, fared better chartwise, but the opening seconds of the video literally depict Minaj playing patty-cake with a guy who pleaded guilty to the use of a child in a sexual performance in 2015. (“FEFE” is also, technically, 6ix9ine’s song, and Minaj’s quiet decision to belatedly tack it to the end of Queen’s tracklist has been read as her own attempt at gaming her Spotify numbers.)
This is a mess. Queen, as a humble collection of songs, is … less of a mess. Blown out to 20 tracks and 69 minutes, it is overpowering by design, its bursts of genius (the brash “LLC” is the filthiest and most inspiring TED Talk you’ve ever heard) fighting for oxygen amid track after track of suffocating excellence. (The worst-case scenario for this phase of Minaj’s career, in terms of outstanding technique translating into opaque joylessness, is Eminem, who shows up on “Majesty” spitting so fast that it basically only registers as spitting.) “Bed,” her sex jam with Ariana Grande, at least attempts to stick in your head, but no one track here packs the blunt-force trauma of “Anaconda,” a smash-hit single that has aged quite poorly for a likewise dense and challenging album (2014’s The Pinkprint) that has, in fact, aged quite well. The question is whether anything on Queen has the slow-burn staying power of The Pinkprint’s “Trini Dem Girls,” and whether anyone other than the most militant Barbz will stick with this new album long enough to find out.
Minaj may object, vehemently, to the notion that she’s “touching 40 soon.” (She’s 35, though she had to fact-check herself even in the midst of those vitriolic DMs.) But she’s undeniably in an odd generational position, four years older than Drake and a solid decade-plus older than most of the SoundCloud rappers currently enrapturing and appalling the hip-hop mainstream. Earlier this decade, Minaj defended herself, vehemently, from classic NYC hip-hop self-seriousness. But nowadays she’s enough of a rap elder that she was forced to clarify that “Barbie Dreams,” a Queen highlight built off 1994’s James Brown–sampling Notorious B.I.G. track “Just Playing (Dreams),” was not a declaration of war against Drake, Young Thug, 50 Cent, Desiigner, et al., even if “Drake worth a hundred milli, always buying me shit / But I don’t know if the pussy wet or if he crying and shit” is the meanest (and greatest) thing about Drake I’ve ever heard.
Is this fun? Is everyone having fun? Is she? Are you? At the 11th hour, Queen’s release date was almost pushed back a week while Minaj made a personal Twitter plea to Tracy Chapman to get a sample cleared. That didn’t work out, and the reaction, from the Barbz, was predictably intense. Meaning, they savaged Chapman in various comment sections with such insults as “Tanisha Chapstick.” Meanwhile, late Monday afternoon, Minaj herself offered this:
It’s going to be a long week.
