| |
Celeb News: Nicki covers NY Times Magazine + interview
Member Since: 10/1/2011
Posts: 53,790
|
Nicki covers NY Times Magazine + interview
The Passion of Nicki Minaj.
Quote:
Nicki Minaj is the world’s biggest female hip-hop star, a top pop star and the first woman to achieve success in both genres. Like Beyoncé, who performed recently in Central Park with the words ‘‘boss’’ and ‘‘hustler’’ flashing on screens behind her, along with a grainy video in which she smashed a vacuum and a sewing machine, Minaj has become expert at modeling the ways that women can wield power in the industry. But she has also drawn attention to the ways in which power can be embodied by a woman standing up for herself and speaking her own mind. Minaj’s behavior isn’t exclusive to her tracks; she also exhibits it in the national telenovela that she, like the rest of these women, to a greater or lesser degree, is running about herself, feeding the public information about her paramours, ex-paramours, peccadilloes and beefs, all of it delivered in social media’s short, sharp bursts.
A month later, the episode was still bothering Minaj. Addressing Cyrus, she told me: ‘‘The fact that you feel upset about me speaking on something that affects black women makes me feel like you have some big balls. You’re in videos with black men, and you’re bringing out black women on your stages, but you don’t want to know how black women feel about something that’s so important? Come on, you can’t want the good without the bad. If you want to enjoy our culture and our lifestyle, bond with us, dance with us, have fun with us, twerk with us, rap with us, then you should also want to know what affects us, what is bothering us, what we feel is unfair to us. You shouldn’t not want to know that.’’
From the Instagram feed of Nicki Minaj: ‘‘Now, I want to take steps to become more aware of who I am, what I like or dislike about my body.’’
IMAGES FROM NICKI MINAJ’S INSTAGRAM FEED.
Minaj stands a bit over five feet tall, and as she padded around barefoot in her hotel suite, there was a tangle of shoes and outfits collected nearby that she had considered but rejected for Fashion Week. Outfits carefully sewn to the measurements of a six-foot-tall model with hipbones like handlebars don’t fit a shapely-all-over woman, and Minaj, like Kim Kardashian, favors garments with spandex in them. In the last 24 hours, she had poured herself into a nude mesh Alexander Wang dress that the most party-hearty 19-year-old would choose only as a beach cover-up; changed to a fire-engine-red two-piece zip-up suit for Wang’s after-party; danced at Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club in the Flatiron district for hours; hit the recording studio with her boyfriend, the Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill; then, finally, crawled into bed in the hotel on the Upper West Side at 7 a.m. She woke up at 3:30 p.m., changing into purple leggings and an oversize black T-shirt, though remnants of the night’s ensembles remained — her hair swept up in a gun moll’s bouffant, a smidge shorter than Amy Winehouse wore hers; several diamond stud earrings crawled up her right ear like a series of buttons on the back of a Victorian gown.
Minaj may have had a fair amount of influence over the fact that pop stars are constantly telling us they’re bosses, or they’re bitches, or they’re ‘‘boss bitches,’’ which seems like a contradiction, or redundant, but is said without a trace of irony. A unique figure who draws 10-year-old girls as fans with her Technicolor wigs, sophisticated mimicry and playful attitude, Minaj also assumes a persona as aggressive, dis-happy and vulgar as any man in hip-hop. She electrifies tracks merely by appearing on them, from Kanye West’s ‘‘Monster’’ in 2010 (‘‘First things first, I’ll eat your brains,’’ she explains) to the electronic dance music artist David Guetta’s ‘‘Hey Mama,’’ with a video featuring her gyrating in a desert scene resembling Burning Man. She’s also the first woman to rise to the very top of the rap game not only as a star but also as a business entity. ‘‘My wrists look like I am a jewel thief/But that’s just cuz I am a boss bitch/Now macaroni cheese and grill my swordfish,’’ she says in a song entitled, appropriately enough, ‘‘Boss Ass Bitch.’’
There’s nothing new about female artists struggling with issues of power and control, but we’re far today from the 1990s, when Queen Latifah proclaimed ‘‘every time I hear a brother call a girl a bitch or a ho/Trying to make a sister feel low/You know all that gots to go.’’ ‘‘Bitch,’’ in music, used to be an insult, a sneer, and it still can be. But female empowerment is a trend, and the word has been reclaimed — by Minaj, in many a track; by Rihanna, in ‘‘Bitch Better Have My Money’’; and triumphantly by Madonna, in her recent track ‘‘Bitch, I’m Madonna.’’ This is good for business and either good for women or not good for women at all.
In another era, Minaj’s sexuality, expressed semi-parodically — pretending she’s a Barbie doll; glorifying women dressed as prostitutes and set in red-light-district windows — might have given feminists pause. But in the 2010s, we have entered a different world in pop culture, one in which sexual repression is perceived as burdensome and perhaps even an inability to holistically integrate the body and self. Young people are identifying and exploring formerly unknown, or at least unlabeled, frontiers of sexuality and gender. And the fact that Minaj is in charge of her own objectification (describing her vagina with more words than I thought existed, and then amplifying its power by rhyming those words), as well as her own monetization (overt product placement in videos is a hallmark) has led most feminist voices to applaud her. But the writer Bell Hooks remains unimpressed, saying of ‘‘Anaconda’’ at a New School panel titled ‘‘Whose Booty Is This?’’: ‘‘This [expletive] is boring. What does it mean? Is there something that I’m missing that’s happening here?’’
‘‘The frequency that Nicki works on is not the easiest frequency for us to wrestle with, because it’s about autonomy, and who has it, and whether we can actually tell the difference between self-objectification and self-gratification,’’ says Treva B. Lindsey, an assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the Ohio State University, continuing: ‘‘Do we even know what an autonomous female looks like in pop culture? What does control even mean in such a corporatized mass-media space?’’
|
FULL:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/11....co/sScQmpuNba
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 2/22/2008
Posts: 46,108
|
|
|
|
|
ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 12/7/2011
Posts: 27,655
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 20,050
|
Sia looks so different here
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 10,037
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 17,831
|
TFM Gaga or Sia? The world will never know
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 9/11/2012
Posts: 5,512
|
Why is she looking like a oompa loompa
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 5/14/2011
Posts: 14,089
|
Why do they never eyeliner on the bottom lid. It annoys me because she looks great with it 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 9/4/2008
Posts: 11,720
|
Interesting look. 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 17,831
|
Quote:
Originally posted by buckingfastard
Why is she looking like a oompa loompa |
Now that you said it 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 1/1/2014
Posts: 5,624
|
Gaga ha impact! 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/7/2015
Posts: 15,135
|
She looks like she can't breathe omg.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 1/3/2014
Posts: 5,919
|
she looks bad 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 4/4/2014
Posts: 2,156
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 1/3/2014
Posts: 5,919
|
Quote:
Originally posted by buckingfastard
Why is she looking like a oompa loompa |
omg
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/7/2015
Posts: 15,135
|
She looks kinda cute. I'm just not feeling the pose...?
|
|
|
|
Banned
Member Since: 1/1/2014
Posts: 10,858
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 3/2/2014
Posts: 5,993
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 9/21/2010
Posts: 29,122
|
I wish the eye shadow didn't match the background.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/18/2013
Posts: 9,981
|
She doesn't look bad, or like y'all ugly faves either so stop trying iT.
____
I'm divided on this look. I love it because it's wacky Nicki again, but then I dislike it because I love her subtle looks too.
|
|
|
|
|
|
