Nicki Minaj On State of Hip Hop: ‘I Wanna Hear Girls Rap Again’
Nicki Minaj has shared her thoughts on the state of female rap, and said plainly she just wants to “hear girls rap again.”
The comments were made in an interview with City Girls’ JT for i-D, and come after Nicki Minaj’s new single “Super Freaky Girl” dominated the Billboard charts this summer. The single propelled Nicki to be the first female solo rap artist to debut at the Hot 100’s summit since Lauryn Hill in 1998 with “Doo Wop (That Thing).”
During the interview, JT noted the single’s “Queen Mix,” which featured the City Girls rapper alongside unsigned rappers Katie Got Bandz, Maliibu Miitch, BIA and Akbar V. The Pinkprint rapper said the “Super Freaky Girl (Queen Mix)” was so she could just hear women spit.
“I wanna hear girls rap again. Like, just rap. When I did my BET Cypher years ago, I purposely didn’t wear revealing clothes,” Nicki said. “I wore a sweatsuit. So even though we were being super freaky girls on the song, and we all had fun, y’all really spit.”
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Elsewhere, Nicki Minaj complimented JT’s verse on the remix.
“I heard your verse and was blown away,” Nicki said. “I was so taken aback by your ability to remain yourself on a song that seemed like a beat that you wouldn’t normally do. I’m in a really great place now.”
She continued: “I feel like whenever I’m happy, I deliver the best music. And in order for me to deliver the best music for my album – which is coming out soon – I have to tap back into the essence of Hip Hop. On the remix of “Super Freaky Girl”, all the girls tapped into that.”
“Super Freaky Girl” is the latest in a line of singles the 39-year-old rapper has dropped since starting off 2022 with her Lil Baby-assisted “Do We Have A Problem?” and “Bussin” in addition to her collaborations with Fivio Foreign and HipHopDX’s 2022 Rising Star Coi Leray.
Nicki Minaj’s comments to i-D come after she scolded the 2023 Grammy Awards for placing “Super Freaky Girl” in the category of Best Pop Solo Performance rather than in any rap category, but she later told E! News the media overexaggerated how frustrated she actually was with the academy.
“I think sometimes people think that I’m more ‘angry’ than I am,” she said. “I could be heated about something right now or this second and five minutes from now, I’ll forget about what I just spoke about.”
Nicki has been teasing her new album for months now and had previously said it would arrive before the end of 2022, and that she expedited the process because of “Super Freaky Girl’s” success.
“I wasn’t sure how I was even feeling about having to put out an album this year, but that song happening and people liking it, that made me happy,” Nicki told Interview Magazine. “People have gone through so much recently that they want to have fun. It’ll probably expedite the album to come out this year.”