A little back story: My girlfriend doesn't like Nicki Minaj. She doesn't think she's talented, she can't stand her flow, and she doesn't like the way she dresses. On the flip side, I jumped on the Nicki bandwagon early, singing her praises after I caught wind of her Beam Me Up Scotty mixtape and shelling out a whole $15 for her debut album Pink Friday. Though I was disappointed with the quantity of verses on the CD (a large portion of the songs inexplicably only containing two 16s), I still felt like it was a solid record and a good move forward for the largely unappreciated (and largely uninteresting) entity of female hip-hop. Christen and I have been at odds about Nicki ever since (with the exception of her cameo on Kanye's "Monster," which everyone agrees is sick), but I was recently swayed by, oddly enough, Eminem.
I was choosing the music as we drove along one day, and happened upon "Roman's Revenge," one of the stand-out tracks from Pink Friday and one in which Nicki and Slim Shady rap alongside one another. After listening to the track quietly, she remarked "Man, Eminem really murdered her on that song. See, this is why I can't like Nicki Minaj. How are you just going to get murdered on your own track like that?" The irony of her favorite MC being Jay-Z was surely not lost on her, but it was at this point that I started to seriously re-evaluate Nicki. Was I into her just because she was a female rapper who could rhyme multi-syllabically? Was she actually just a mediocre rapper getting by on the novelty of her gender?
It was the first single off of Eminem/Royce da 5'9's collaborative LP Hell: The Sequel that cemented things for me. "Fast Lane" as a track (and as a single) is pretty fantastic, and the music video is pretty fun, so I'm just going to make you watch it before we talk about it:
http://www.youtube.com/user/BadMeetsEvilVEVO
Did you notice the little bit about the danish? Let's take a closer look at it:
And you only live it once, so I'm thinkin' 'bout this nice, nice lady
Wait, no, stop me now 'fore I get on a roll (Danish) Let me tell you
What this pretty little dame's name is cause she's kinda famous
And I hope that I don't sound too heinous when I say this Nicki Minaj
But I wanna stick my penis in your anus!
Wait, no, stop me now 'fore I get on a roll (Danish) Let me tell you
What this pretty little dame's name is cause she's kinda famous
And I hope that I don't sound too heinous when I say this Nicki Minaj
But I wanna stick my penis in your anus!
The disturbing mental image of Eminem having anal sex with Nicki Minaj aside, the mocking tone of Shady's imitation of Nicki's flow (which was not missed by the wonderful folks over at rapgenius) seems to indicate that, though Eminem respects her as an artist enough to be on her album, he isn't impressed with her "abuse of punch-line flow."
Hearing one of the 5 most talented lyricists in the history of the game use Minaj's flow comically made me realize the gap between the two. Revisiting Minaj's verses on "Roman's Revenge", I found some really embarrassing lines that I had let slide on my first few listens (most egregiously, "I am a movie; camera block."). Christen still maintains that Nicki simply isn't talented, but other sections of "Roman's Revenge" prove that theory false; it seems more likely to me that she has yet to dedicate herself fully to her lyrics. The real failing of this sort of punch-line flow is that it doesn't bother to incorporate the puns/metaphors into the actual sentence structure of the line, instead opting to just tack nouns and adjectives to the end of statements and let the listener figure out how they are related. This is laziness; one of the great challenges of the hip-hop lyricist is being able to seamlessly weave metaphors into sentences in a way that doesn't seem forced (see Lupe Fiasco on much of his classic record The Cool). It isn't that I don't think that Nicki is capable of doing this, it's that I don't think she feels particularly compelled to. Unfortunately, until she does her lyrics will suffer and her flow will be a fair target for mockery by artists like Em who work hard to find ways to fit their jokes and metaphors into their actual sentences.
Other notes on the new Bad Meets Evil record:
-It's nice to see Nickel finally get some of the props he deserves. He's been killing it since about 2008 outside of the public eye.
-Em's comments about Relapse on "The Reunion" are refreshing for people like me who were huge fans of the CD. Em's verses on the song portray him bumping the CD in his car with a random girl, who is disgusted with the album's content and tells him that it "sucked," cracking it in half in front of him, which naturally causes him to murder her. As one Rapgenius commenter suggests, this may indicate that Em's initial distancing of himself from the record was more of an attempt to create a new lane for himself than an accurate representation of how he felt about the record's artistic content. Perhaps he felt like he had to diss Relapse in order to sell the "recovery" narrative? The fact remains that this song definitely indicates that the CD is no longer "in [his] trash," since he's playing it in his car. His interview with Complex confirms that he's no longer on that "fuck Relapse" tip: "I mean, listen, I don’t hate Relapse. I don’t hate it at all, but when I’m looking back at an album I do have a tendency, and especially with that album, to run things into the ground. That was one of those instances where I got in a zone, like, 'Yo I just want to be this demented serial killer on this album.' And part of that was a growing process to get to Recovery, working through those steps, relearning how to rap, and relearning where I need to be at."
-One of the most disappointing rap moments of the year for me was Em's clumsy and over-explained re-use of his brilliant Brett Favre line from the Shady 2.0 Mixtape on "I'm On Everything." Not only is re-using a line on your very NEXT RELEASE totally weak, it totally cheapened the original line, which was one of my favorites of the year.
-The Shady on Recovery and the Shady on Hell: The Sequel are opposite extremes: the former is often awkward or heavy-handed lyrically but deals with important, real-life issues and the latter is lyrically excellent but basically has nothing to say of importance. Em's greatest works have resulted in a happy medium of these two extremes, so I'm really pumped to hear what his next record will sound like.
Other notes on the new Bad Meets Evil record:
-It's nice to see Nickel finally get some of the props he deserves. He's been killing it since about 2008 outside of the public eye.
-Em's comments about Relapse on "The Reunion" are refreshing for people like me who were huge fans of the CD. Em's verses on the song portray him bumping the CD in his car with a random girl, who is disgusted with the album's content and tells him that it "sucked," cracking it in half in front of him, which naturally causes him to murder her. As one Rapgenius commenter suggests, this may indicate that Em's initial distancing of himself from the record was more of an attempt to create a new lane for himself than an accurate representation of how he felt about the record's artistic content. Perhaps he felt like he had to diss Relapse in order to sell the "recovery" narrative? The fact remains that this song definitely indicates that the CD is no longer "in [his] trash," since he's playing it in his car. His interview with Complex confirms that he's no longer on that "fuck Relapse" tip: "I mean, listen, I don’t hate Relapse. I don’t hate it at all, but when I’m looking back at an album I do have a tendency, and especially with that album, to run things into the ground. That was one of those instances where I got in a zone, like, 'Yo I just want to be this demented serial killer on this album.' And part of that was a growing process to get to Recovery, working through those steps, relearning how to rap, and relearning where I need to be at."
-One of the most disappointing rap moments of the year for me was Em's clumsy and over-explained re-use of his brilliant Brett Favre line from the Shady 2.0 Mixtape on "I'm On Everything." Not only is re-using a line on your very NEXT RELEASE totally weak, it totally cheapened the original line, which was one of my favorites of the year.
-The Shady on Recovery and the Shady on Hell: The Sequel are opposite extremes: the former is often awkward or heavy-handed lyrically but deals with important, real-life issues and the latter is lyrically excellent but basically has nothing to say of importance. Em's greatest works have resulted in a happy medium of these two extremes, so I'm really pumped to hear what his next record will sound like.
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