Oh hey, beautiful! So nice to see you on the cover of a MAJOR FASHION MAGAZINE. We're proud to be your first ever cover, but somehow this feels like a coronation, a Versace-swathed debutante unveiling for Miss Nicki. Maybe V Magazine is where she has always belonged, patrolling the cultural intersection of two demographics that she acknowledged on Monday for having helped make her a star:
We don't mean to box Nicki into a corner. It's now clear that she belongs to everyone, not just the urban army that's turned her into the latest post-Warhol cartoon icon. There's a video interview with Marilyn Monroe in which the interviewer asks Marilyn, after being on the cover of almost every magazine on the planet, which rag she'd most love to beam her shining face from. Marilyn is the woman that covered Playboy's first issue, but her response wasn't sexy. She politely answered that she'd feel validated by domestic, wholesome Ladies Home Journal. That publication lacks the hard-edged and hip New York sheen of so many "cool" magazines, but perhaps signified success to Marilyn precisely for that reason, a red, white, and blue Apple Pie introduction to America that would sit sweetly on linoleum countertops or stuffed into the magazine holders on the sides of LA-Z-Boy armchairs.
Is that next for Nicki? Pink Friday has gone platinum and invaded homes all over America, 11 year old girls replacing their actual Barbie dolls with more grown-up Minaj raps about a Barbie alter-ego. And these V covers, even the one with the voodoo-inspired face paint, show Nicki as a woman who is calm in costume, wise and relaxed and pretty. But does Nicki have a shot at Ladies Home Journal? Maybe she doesn't want it. The Queen of rap should probably preserve a bit of edge. But we're ever hopeful that Nicki's influence will continue to have no limits, that her broadcast has as many channels as are available. First FADER, then the world. Check out more images of Nicki's shoot in V after the jump.
