Nicki
Minaj Hip Pop Queen:
Da
Baddest Barbie in the like, Mutha Fuckin Hood
Nicki
Minaj... sigh… another potentially brilliant female hip hop artist who got
sucked into to capitalizing from post-feminist notions of material wealth and
infantilized (hetero)sexual desirability... shame really, she's got a good
flow. Ironically, Minaj, like most contemporary female pop icons - Beyonce,
Rihanna, Gaga, Spears, etc. – are hailed in popular media as liberated women celebrating
“girl power” and supposed gender equality. Taking a critical feminist cultural
studies approach, I argue quite the contrary: their personas and lyrics perpetuate excessively consumptive
lifestyles and (re)inscribe degrading sexualization, exoticization, and
objectification of women(‘s bodies), which contribute to global economic
inequity and women and girls’ ongoing social, political, economic, cultural,
material and psychological oppression, respectively. While I admit that Minaj
is a very talented artist and that her spectacular success in an overtly
misogynistic male-dominated hip pop music
scene is something worthy of accolade, it is also something worthy of critical
examination, especially when considering her place in relation the flamboyant neoliberal
marketplace.
What
is it about Minaj that makes her so “fit in” so well to the world of hip pop? What does it mean that she a young
black woman who dresses like and worships Barbie? What effects might her
highly sexualized lyrics and movements combined with overtly infantilized appearances
and facial expressions have on her young female fans? Is she actually pushing
any gender boundaries or merely treading skillfully along those firmly
established for her by a misogynistic music industry? Is the mere fact that she
is a successful female rapper worthy of celebration or must we also consider
the content of her media? What concerns me are the materialistic,
self-objectifying, heteronormative, orientalized, infantilized, and eroticized
messages of (black) femininity that her music and videos send to her millions
of very young female fans. It has been noted by pop culture and girlhood
scholars that racialized women are largely absent from popular culture. The
ideal of femininity that all girls, regardless of race, class, or gender are presented
with is white, wealthy, thin and trendy (Lipkin, 2009). So when an African
American woman such as Minaj appears on the scene and (re)present the very same
ideal, the impossible standard is reified for all women. Skin colour becomes
irrelevant, erased and girls are told that no matter what culture we come from
we can all become Barbie together. That’s what wigs and make-up are for!! Look
at Nicki!!
While
it is important to remember that girls who receive her media are not passive
consumers incapable of making their own meanings, even queering them, it is
equally important to be aware that subtle messages in popular culture are
proven to reify and normalize potentially harmful gender and race performances
and roles (Lipkin, 2009). In this analysis I engage critical feminist girlhood
studies discourses around post-feminism, neoliberalism, and normative
femininity to both explore and complicate the messages that pop culture icon
Nicki Minaj’s media is sending to young girls, particularly to girls of colour,
while she is simultaneously celebrated in mainstream media as demonstrative of
increasing racial and gender equity.
With
a fan base ranging from five to twenty years old, Minaj is a powerful influence
in lives of millions of girls around the world. Born in Trinidad and raised in
Queens, twenty-six year old rapper Nicki Minaj shares the similar rags to
riches stories of many African American rappers. Guardian journalist Alexis Petridis (2010) writes that Minaj’s “ bio is the standard hip-hop litany of childhood
misery, involving a crack-addicted father who attempted to murder her mother by
trying to burn down their house.” However, rather than rap about the tragic
conditions that shaped her youth and the political and social factor that led
to them, Minaj raps about
bitches and hoes, money and fast cars, going to the club, pleasing men, getting
drunk and getting low. Minaj doesn’t address forces of racism, classism or
sexism in her music; in such erasure / avoidance, she diverges from a history
of subversive lyrical content established by female hip hop artists in the
l980s and 90s. Instead she wanders doe-eyed through worlds of sexy, glamorous,
adventurous, and cliché make believe. Hers is a media of role-playing, disturbingly
reminiscent of cheesy pornos. In every video she performs a different cliché
character, sending messages that escapism and make-believe are legitimate and
esteemed aspects of female subjectivity that bring about great “success”.
Minaj
dresses in everything skin-tight, bright pink, and glitter, reminding us that
while she may be a bad-ass rapper chick, she is always also, a Barbie girl (as she calls herself and named one of her
albums). In each video Minaj assumes one or many of clinche feminine roles, be
it Cinderella Bride (see “Moment 4 Life”),
Geisha (see “Your Love”), Exotic
Jungle Girl (see “Massive Attack”),
Bad-Ass Ghetto Chic (see “My Chick Bad”
ft. Ludacris), Hysterical Diva (see “Right
Thru Me”), Pink Candy Girl (see “Super
Bass”), and the list goes on. Throughout her changing character roles, her
helium balloon bosom and bottom, plump bubblegum-pink lips, grapefruit-sized
waist, flawless caramel latte complexion, anime-esque coiffures, outrageously
manicured nails, absurdly sexualized clothing, and incessant quest for male
(sexual) attention remain central and constant features in every music video.
While some might argue that Minaj’s changing roles are representative of
postmodern feminist notions of unstable and shifting identities, I would argue
that Minaj’s schizophrenic character changes more accurately represent the
angst, confusion, and hurt resulting from psychological escapism and desperate
attempts to appeal to a hegemonic (commodified) male gaze which all female
artists are pressured to subsume should they seek to advance their careers in
the world of mainstream pop music culture.
Summarizing
an argument in Sharon Lamb’s The Secret
Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do – Sex Play, Aggression, and Their
Guilt, Lipkin (2009) writes that “since African American girls less
frequently see mainstream ideals of beauty and goodness that represent them,
they may think [quintessential feminine] standards are less relevant,” and they
are “perhaps shielded from the media’s deleterious influence” (p.94). A
critical analysis of Nicki Minaj’s emergence in the world of popular culture
suggests otherwise. Despite her blackness, her childhood in Queens, NY, and her
background influences of politically progressive and oftentimes feminist old school
hip hop, Minaj in no way escaped from the overwhelming mainstream messages
telling girls what they “ought” to be (eg. Rich Blonde Sexy Barbie Girl).
Instead, in a rather sickeningly miraculous way, Minaj has somehow managed to
embrace, to become, to thrive in the mergence of every contradiction all at
once, setting an even more impossible standard for young girls.
In
the article Young Women and Consumer
Culture, McRobbie (2009) explains how post-feminism in the context of a
neoliberal society opens up for re-invention the “category of youthful
womanhood, for whom freedom has now been won” (p.533). I suggest that it is
this new space opened by the marketplace that Minaj inhabits, reinventing the
category of girl as an even more impossible standard, conflating practically
every contradicting claim of what it means to be a girl into one outrageous
pink package. Minaj is the bad girl and the
good girl, the black ghetto mama and
the white Barbie princess, the mean gansta rapper and the sweet pop queen, the raunchy porn star and the innocent girl child, the wild diva and the submissive doe, the ideal girlfriend and the independent career woman, the exotic jungle creature and the familiar girl next door, the
anything-you-want-me-to-be and the
don’t-tell-me-who-I-am, she is, in effect, the perfect illusion, the impossible
person, the perfect girl. Lipkin (2009) and Currie, Kelly & Pomerantz
(2009) elaborate on these how contradictory binaries in which girls are
represented create harmful and unrealistic standards by which girls evaluate
themselves and each other. With
Minaj, we see a woman who seems to circumvent the impossible and in doing so
she capitalizes from fluidly embodying each and every hegemonic feminine
stereotype / male fantasy out there. Minaj represents an amalgamtion, an
erasure, a monocrop, a globalized culture, a neoliberal market, a postfeminist,
postracist, postclassist illusion, she represent the new world order. Minaj
sends the message that there is nothing wrong with the traditional femininity,
there is nothing wrong with materialism and consumerism. Black girls can be
Barbie and Biggie at the same time.
Equality is here.
Sharon
Lamb writes that “loud girls make themselves more “masculine” in the eyes of
the culture when they are loud, and this may make them more vulnerable to
proving their femininity in stereotypical ways” (quoted from Lipkin, 2009,
p.95). As a rapper, Nicki Minaj is no doubt a “loud girl”, and given that
rapping itself is generally perceived as a masculine style of music, I would
argue that Minaj exaggerates stereotypical portrayals of sexualized and
infantilized femininity so as not to threaten hegemonic gender roles. Her
Barbie-ness serves as a passport into the male dominated hip pop scene by overshadowing her skills as
a rapper. Her acceptance in popular media is a result of her image first, and
her talent second. And yet still, even though all of her songs are about
seeking male approval, rumours that she is bi-sexual abound, which plays into
the heterosexual male fantasy of a threesome with two girls on the one hand,
and perpetuates the notion that because she excels at a supposedly “male” skill
(rapping), she must share male desires (women). Put her in baggy jeans and
t-shirt and she would no doubt be rumoured lesbian.
Nicki
Minaj also reveals a “new” genre of femininity that I am witnessing emerging in
contemporary pop culture. Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Beyonce, Rihanna, Minaj and
others are all portraying this kind of fetishized weirdness, bizarreness,
counter-culture, underground wannabee-ness. I see it trickling into girl
culture with the resurgence of neon colours and evermore bizarre fashions and
the celebration of “difference”, the “lone wolf”. I understand this as
resulting directly from neoliberal market pressures promoting individuality, so
that now every girl is told that she must also be “one-of-a-kind”, she must
stand out, break free from traditional feminine roles while maintaining them
simultaneously. Minaj is an example of this new type of femininity, what might
be described as “excessive uniqueness”. We also see this in the popular film Mean Girls. The protagonist appears to
be transcending traditional gender boundaries, flourishing as her own unique
self, when really, she is repeating the same old validation through materialism
and male attention. In a postfeminist consumer culture, it is still fundamentally about what a girl looks
like and how she arouses heterosexual male desire that come first. It is for
this reason that we must remain critical and promote alternative media for
girls’ consumption. The question remains however, and we will soon see, whether
Minaj is a foot in the door for female rappers worldwide, or a tragic commodified
diversion from / appropriation of a legacy of positive alternative messages
available to young girls through in the tradition of hip hop feminism.
References
Currie, D., Kelly,
D., & Pomerantz, S. (2009). Girl
Power: Girls Reinventing Girlhood.
New
York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc.
Lipkin, E. (2009). Girls’ Studies. Berkeley, California:
Seal Studies.
McRobbie, A. (2009).
Young Women and Consumer Culture. Cultural
Studies, 22 (5), 531-550.
Petridis, A. (2010, November
22). Nicki Minaj: Pink Friday – Review. The
Guardian
music/2010/nov/22/nicki-minaj-pink-friday-review/print
