The most successful female rapper in history, Nicki Minaj changed the game when she blew up in 2010. After the hits dried up for Missy Elliott, Eve and Lil' Kim in the early '00s, it was rare to hear a woman rhyming on the radio, but in 2010 alone, Minaj was on the charts with 19 different songs, including collaborations with heavy hitters like Mariah Carey ("
Up Out My Face (Remix)"), Eminem ("
Roman's Revenge") and Rihanna ("
Fly"). She set a record that October by having seven songs on the Hot 100 at the same time, and her debut album,
Pink Friday, wasn't even released yet.
She cites Lauryn Hill, Bob Marley, Foxy Brown, Jay-Z, Lil' Wayne, Leona Lewis and Natasha Bedingfield as her musical influences. She's also a big fan of Enya, the Irish singer who makes soothing, atmospheric music. Nicki says it helps her relax and boosts her creativity.
Her style is characterized by the presence of different personalities, which stems from her troublesome family. Minaj, whose real name is Onika Tanya Maraj, formed alter egos growing up to cope with her childhood. She told New York Magazine: "To get away from all their fighting, I would imagine being a new person. 'Cookie' was my first identity - that stayed with me for a while. I went on to Harajuku Barbie, then Nicki Minaj. Fantasy was my reality."
She studied drama at the Manhattan performing-arts high school LaGuardia. Acting helped develop her "alter-ego" style.
"I do lots of weird voices and I kind of act out my raps," Minaj told Slate magazine. "Acting allowed me to be playful and crazy, and it helps me tell stories." She also shared with Details, "I look at rap as an opportunity to act. My head is full of different characters - in each song I'm auditioning a character."
Speaking about her time at LaGuardia during an appearance on Live With Kelly & Mark, Minaj said, "As soon as I went to school, I told my teachers to call me Cookie and I had all of my teachers call me Cookie in my drama department, not in the academics, we didn't really pay too much attention about them, but like my acting teachers, they knew that they had to call me that and all the acting students called me that."
Her most popular alter-egos include "Roman Zolanski," who is an angry, homosexual male; "Martha Zolanski," who is Roman's mother and has a distinct British accent; "Barbie," who is supposed to be a very feminine and innocent girl; and "Rosa," whom she made up when she was a guest on The George Lopez Show in 2010. She says her alter-egos have their own individual styles and you have to listen for the accent to know who you're dealing with.
In her Eminem collaboration "
Roman's Revenge," Minaj raps as Roman Zolanski and Eminem raps as his well-known alter-ego, Slim Shady.
Despite Nicki's bad girl image, there was a time when she studied hard to get good grades. "Junior high school I was down with the A-[grade] students!" she confessed to Australian radio show hosts Kyle and Jackie O. "But then in high school I studied acting, so between my acting classes and getting a boyfriend I just started paying less attention to my academics. I would pass everything when I went but I didn't do as well as I could have done if I went every day."
She got that tattoo on her left arm when she was 16. It means "God is always with you" in Chinese. Nicki said during a 2010 video interview that she regrets the inking.
The change from her real name, Onika Maraj, to Nicki Minaj wasn't her idea, and she wasn't happy about it. "Somebody changed my name," she told The Guardian in 2012. "One of the first production deals I signed, the guy wanted my name to be Minaj and I fought him tooth and nail. But he convinced me. I've always hated it."
For about 40 years, Aretha Franklin held the record for most Hot 100 hits by a female solo artist, but on the chart dated April 1, 2017, Nicki Minaj broke that record when "
No Frauds," "
Regret in Your Tears" and "Changed It" all debuted on the chart, giving her 73 for her career. In 2020 Taylor Swift claimed that title when all 16 songs from her
Folklore album charted at once thanks to diligent streaming by Swifties. From that point forward, pretty much every song Swift released made the chart.
Though Minaj is known for her raunchy rapping, her own musical tastes are different. She wrote on her Instagram page: "I listen to old dancehall and gospel more than all other genres on my personal time. Lol. Go figure."
According to a dataset pulled from Spotify from January to October of 2015, any track featuring Nicki Minaj as a guest artist was streamed 172% more often, on average, than other tracks on the artist's album.
Speaking to Paper Magazine, Nicki Minaj revealed she doesn't take her haters too seriously because she can turn to God for support. She explained:
"You can usually bet your bottom dollar that anytime you see something on the Internet going on with me, no matter how it looks, I'm usually behind the scenes laughing. Because I have a strong relationship with God. I've watched Him work miracle after miracle in my life. I've watched Him shut down every person who's ever come up against me, and so it's comical at this point 'cause I sometimes feel like, 'Wow. Don't they know how this movie's gonna play out? Cause I definitely know how this movie's gonna play out.'"
When "
Dip (Remix)" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 dated November 10, 2018 Nicki Minaj became the first female artist to clock up 100 career appearances on the chart. She joined four other acts with triple-digit totals: Elvis Presley, The Glee Cast, Drake and Lil Wayne.
She launched an official app in 2011 that included a "Nictionary" with translations of words and phrases she uses, spoken in her voice. It's where we learned that a "Barbie Backhand" is "The act of using intense force while unexpectedly giving the backhand to a hater."
