Will the real Nicki Minaj please stand up?

In March 2022, Nicki Minaj sat down with Joe Budden for a wide-ranging conversation about Billboard metrics, plastic surgery, trend-chasers and more. A little under an hour into the conversation, the topic shifts to her influence in the world of fashion. “You would think that the biggest female rapper of all time… would have been on the cover of American Vogue,” Minaj said. “But she hasn’t.”

Last month Anna Wintour finally got wise and Nicki finally got her cover. It’s a tidy microcosm for Minaj’s career more broadly, a series of ambitions manifested through faith and sweat that laid the groundwork for our current bumper crop of female rappers and sketched out one potential path for the synthesis of hip-hop and pop music in the digital music era. When she was five years old, she prayed to become rich enough to buy her mother a house; now forty and a mother herself, Minaj has retreated from the public eye in recent years with little left to prove to anyone, even herself. Still, her appeal endures — the streaming release of Beam Me Up Scotty peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Charts more than a decade after its original DatPiff drop. Judicious remixes of Ice Spice’s “Princess Diana” and Sexyy Red’s “Pound Town” kept Minaj top of mind this year, as did an Aqua-remixing collaboration with Spice for the Barbie soundtrack that quickly found global success.

Part of Nicki’s charm is that she’s always herself, first and foremost. Even when contorting her style to the form of EDM-readymades, she sounds like Nicki Minaj. Perhaps equally important, even with a plethora of sons running around, no one else’s music sounds like Nicki; they bite the flows and the clothes, but amassing and deploying the resources required for heavily-produced blockbuster albums requires more than mere creative inspiration. One person who doesn’t see Minaj in her recent albums? Nicki herself.

“When I look back at a lot of my music, I’m like, Oh, my God, where was the me in it?” she told Vogue last month. “For this album, I went back to the old game plan.” The back-to-basics, “I’m bringing back the old me” framing is a tried-and-true album cycle narrative, but it’s jarring to hear coming from Minaj. If we’ve been listening to Nicki watered down, what does it sound like to hear Nicki fired up?

Nominally a sequel to her 2010 debut album, Pink Friday 2 does not answer this question. Its sonic palette hews more closely to the textures of 2014’s The Pinkprint and 2018’s Queen, but largely fails to deliver the same intoxicating vulnerability or sharp-tongued bars. There are a handful of highlights, but the misstep feels particularly bizarre given some of the weakest songs stem from the same kinds of artistic decisions she’s mocked in recent interviews.

The tone is quickly set by the one-two punch of “Are You Gone Already” and “Barbie Dangerous,” which find Nicki rapping over barely-altered tracks by Billie Eilish and the Notorious B.I.G. respectively. On the former, she sketches out an image of pre- and post-partum stress, exacerbated by the concurrent passing of her father. The latter is more predictable fare: these bitches are weak, they copy the queen, beef and jealousy will be answered with bullets. These tracks gesture towards the ethos of 2007 Lil Wayne but fail to achieve the same ownership over the source material. Held up against the relevant comps from Nicki’s own oeuvre (The Pinkprint opener “All Things Go” and Queen’s hilarious “Barbie Dreams”), these songs fall flat, neither transformative nor superlative.

Nostalgia is rife on PF2, which features prominent samples on 11 of 22 tracks. Six of these are barely chopped or altered, as if watching Minaj karaoke and freestyle in real-time. The approach isn’t new for Nicki, who has managed a cheat code sample on most of her studio albums, but the sheer quantity, and how recognizable they are, is remarkable, nearly equivalent to the number of rips on the 2009 mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty.

That isn’t to suggest none of these songs work. Rick James-sampling lead single “Super Freaky Girl” finds a sister in “Pink Friday Girls,” which repurposes Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” to similarly high-octane effect. As on 2014’s “Anaconda,” throwbacks serve as a tool for bringing the past into conversation with the now, like a DJ at the club dropping an ‘80s hit in between new cuts by BNYX and ATL Jacob.

More traditionally overhauled samples offer a renewed glimpse at Minaj’s lyrical prowess. Jersey club-derived Lil Uzi Vert feature “Everybody” gives Nicki room to cut loose, bragging that she’s a “multimillion-dollar home(body);” elsewhere, album highlight “FTCU” flips a scream-along club anthem by Waka Flocka Flame into a rumbling club anthem ready to test the low-end of your speaker system (“Spotify ain’t gotta lie, they really streaming my music” she smirks).

Even if you agree with Minaj’s assessment that “Everything that feels nostalgic is making people feel better right now ‘cause we’ve had a couple of tough years,” leaning so heavily on the past feels like a tacit admission of weakness. Take it from Nicki herself, speaking to Jada Pinkett-Smith last October:

Minaj has been on a particularly hot streak of selective features in the five years since Queen, leaving a vicious mark on tracks by BIA, and Kim Petras, to name just a few. That makes the lyrical flatness and static flows pervading Pink Friday 2 all the more disappointing. The zany voices and camp theatrics of the original Pink Friday and Pink Friday 1.5: Roman Reloaded are nowhere to be found. Pussies are tight, asses are thick; the menace Nicki previously conveyed through her snarling, no-holds-barred vocal delivery is now relegated to tossed-off bars about gang affiliations and boilerplate warnings that her team will “snap like chat” and “pull up from the three” to shoot you. Sure, it’s probably true that these verses feel familiar because we’ve grown accustomed to the nuances of Nicki’s style and because so, so many women in hip-hop cite her as an inspiration. But it’s hard not to feel a pang of longing for the Nicki Minaj who brutally berated stupid hoes and threatened to put her “dick in your face.”

To be fair, Minaj has characterized Pink Friday 2 as a more mature album, and pruning is as important to new growth as watering. Whether she sells that characterization is a little more complicated. Nicki the Rapper and Nicki the Romantic rarely mingle on this album — fans of “Super Bass” and “Your Love” will have to get their fix of bars and ballads in separate places. And there’s a thematic inconsistency here too, between Minaj’s more demure role as a mother and the iconography of a sex-positive popstar.

“Not saying that I’m not a freak with my husband,” Minaj told Pinkett-Smith last year. “But I don’t choose to express the sexual side right now in that overt way.”

Threading this tension isn’t easy, but PF2 somehow features the line “These bitches gotta shake they ass to show sex appeal” just three tracks before “Vanilla ice cream comin' down my ass cheeks/these them throw it back, make it clap cheeks.” The juxtaposition makes her aversion to the sexually explicit rap dominating the airwaves scan as disingenuous potshots at her contemporaries.

A little cognitive dissonance is nothing new for the Barbz, who have stuck with Minaj through controversies including marrying a convicted sex offender, her brother’s conviction for child sexual assault, her support of accused sex offender 6ix9ine, and an episode of COVID vaccine skepticism that earned her a shoutout from Tucker Carlson. One imagines there are at least a handful of former Nicki diehards who find some of this behavior a bridge too far, although you’d never know it from her chart performance. But even out of frame, the context is there, practically tangible on tracks like J. Cole-feature “Let Me Calm Down,” which details the arc of Minaj’s relationship with Kenneth Petty from high school to the present day. The moral question here is more complex than engaging with the music of Kodak Black or Kanye West, but it certainly amplifies the squeamishness of listening to Dr. Luke collabs “Super Freaky Girl” and “Cowgirl.”

On a purely musical level, Pink Friday 2 fails to live up to her previous albums or chart a new path forward for Minaj, despite powerhouse performances on “Last Time I Saw You,” “Nicki Hendrix,” and “FTCU.” Forget the peaks of “Moment 4 Life” or “Check It Out;” even after a decade of sharpening her skills, the songs here barely hold a candle to “Blazin.” If this is the result of the “old game plan,” let’s hope she goes back to the new one.

Rap Column is a column about rap music by Vivian Medithi and Nadine Smith for The FADER.