Originally posted by Claire Lobenfeld

2009 was a landmark year for YMCMB before we even, or maybe they even, knew it. Before "Bed Rock" solidified them as a crew led by a superstar with two more slowly ascending their way to his level, Drake released So Far Gone in January and Nicki Minaj's third and most-impactful mixtape, Beam Me Up, was released in April. On the 18th, Nicki's first real showing will turn five and it functions not only as a milemarker for her own wild success but it's also packed with little reminders, upon listening to it through a 2014 lens, that pop music as a whole (and not vis-a-vis poptimism) has morphed and grown—and how, even when she was still heavily clawing at other female artists, she was mutilating misogyny-driven language to talk about her own power.

Perhaps the most dated reference on the song [I Get Crazy] right now is "I am the rap Hannah Montana." It's prescient on so many levels because Nicki figured out how to be on two sides of the coin in her career.

There is not much on Scotty to imply that Nicki would become a pop superstar, but reflecting on that lyric five years later, it's as if she knew. For the unfamiliar, the premise of Hannah Montana is that Cryus' character Miley Stewart is a huge international popstar at night, but a regular school girl by day, separating the two personas only by a wig, and living in, as the theme song goes, "the best of both worlds." It's exactly where Nicki has landed. While no song on the tape feature her just singing, the title track closer hints that she wasn't just interested in snatching rap queen crowns as she takes full-blown shots at Rihanna and Amy Winehouse (who was the still alive).

Whether it was intentional or not, it's hard not to see the analogue between the name Beam Me Up and "Starships" and how she has been truly able to tow the line. She has monumental appeal to Taylor Swift fans as much as someone who pines for the presence of fire-breathing female rappers in the mainstream like the days of Kim and Foxy. All of it exists in some outer space world that Nicki has crafted, only she can wear a wig in whatever realm she chooses.

Five full years later, it's clear we haven't known Nicki for very long, but we've watched her blossom from concrete rose into an avant-garde bouquet in that short period of time. But she's known herself and has just been waiting for us to really get it. Beam Me Up was the warning and that's why we should be heeding the ones she's sending us now.