Sara Libby writes about Nicky Minaj:
Emma Carmichael, writing at The Awl, sees Minaj's dual roles as singer and rapper—particularly one who's willing to talk about all those girly emotions she has—on Pink Friday as a capitulation that somehow directly relates to her femaleness, an act of selling out for a girl who once declared "Def Jam said I'm no Lauryn Hill/Can't rap and sing on the same CD/The public won't get it, they got A.D.D."
I'm not so sure this is the case. I'm, admittedly, late to jump on the Minaj-wagon, but I think there's something remarkably empowering about a girl who can, through various outlandish characters, absolutely destroy the men she's appearing with on their own tracks, but who saves the revealing details about her life for the album in which she's the star. And as for her singing—it's no different than Drake's decision to sing his own refrains; and whatever her vocal limitations are, it's infinitely better than listening to a hyper-autotuned hook like the one she included on the mixtape track "Still I Rise."
Take this with a grain of salt, because I've only heard Beam Me Up Scotty. But the most significant way in which she defines herself as a "female emcee" is her focus on being competitive with other women rappers -- at least explicitly. That feels very strange, even when she dropping a dope line like "baddest underground since Harriet Tub." While I really don't like a lot of Minaj's club-inspired production and I'm not blown away by her lyrically yet, I'd say she can probably ride a beat better than just about anyone else, male or female, that we've been introduced to in the past decade.
Maybe her album is different in this respect, but it's odd to me that the rapper who walked all over Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Rick Ross on Monster should be confining so much of her delightful trash talk to hip-hop's sparse female roster. Her beef with Lil' Kim is made even more ridiculous by the fact that Kim is really only Minaj's rival by default, owing more to women emcees' relative lack of commercial success than parity in talent.
Still, good music just isn't primarily about social justice, no matter how much some might want it to be, but it's not surprising to me that anyone waiting for a talented and commercially successful female emcee to subvert hip-hop's restrictive gender binaries would be happy about Nicki Minaj. After all, even if she spends a lot of time dissing other female emcees, most of the time, it's the dude she's sharing a track with that's really getting shamed.
