Nicki Minaj

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About

Nicki Minaj is the stage name for the Trinidadian-born American musician Onika Tanya Maraj. The pop artist rose to fame after her debut album Pink Friday was released by Young Money Records in November of 2010.

Online History

Minaj's Myspace page^[8] was created on November 10th, 2006 which features audio tracks, tour dates and music videos by the artist. One of the earliest fan sites nicki-minaj.org^[7] was registered on January 17th, 2009. The site Nick Minaj Quotes^[17], where notable quotes attributed to Minaj are displayed, was registered on March 20th, 2010. Minaj’s official website My Pink Friday^[5] featuring a blog, a community chat and a web forum was registered on September 10th, 2010. On January 27th, 2011, Minaj released an official iPhone app^[27] that included a "Nictionary" with phrases used by the pop artist.

The NickiMinajAtVevo YouTube^[6] channel, which was launched on April 1st, 2010, accumulates an average of 685,000 views a day. Minaj often wears elaborate costumes and flashy wigs in music videos and live performances. On April 8th, 2011, BuzzFeed^[15] published several photos of Minaj in a post titled "Top 20 Nicki Minaj Wigs." Hundreds of mash-ups and remixes using Minaj's tracks have been submitted to the music sharing site Soundcloud.^[9] The Nicki Minaj public figure Facebook^[4] page has over 15 million likes, the verified @NICKMINAJ Twitter account^[3] has over 9,000,000 followers and there are over 5,700 Minaj fan art submissions on deviantArt^[14] as of February 8th, 2012.

Super Bass

The song "Super Bass", written by Minaj, Daniel Johnson and Ester Dean, was debuted on the radio as a single for the album Pink Friday on April 5th, 2011. The video was uploaded to the NickiMinajAtVEVO YouTube channel on May 5th, 2011.

On June 2nd, 2011, the pop music duo Karmin uploaded a cover of Minaj's single "Super Bass." The video received over 13 million views within 7 months.

On September 19th, 2011, a video of 8-year-old Sophia Grace Brownlee performing a cover of “Super Bass” was uploaded to YouTube. The original video received over 30 million views within 5 months. On October 12th, she appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and performed a duet with Minaj.

As of February 2012, a Selena Gomez cover has over 19 million views, Julie Anne San Jose's cover has over 13 million views, Drew Tabor's cover has over 3.4 million views and the nanaluvstroubles cover has over 2 million views.

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"Stupid Hoe" Video

On January 20th, 2012, the video for the single "Stupid Hoe" was uploaded to the NickiMinajAtVEVO YouTube channel. The video was not well received on the video sharing site and accumulated over 345,000 dislikes in 19 days. On February 1st, TMZ^[16] reported that the video had been banned from the Black Entertainment Television (BET) network.

Parodies

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Reputation

On March 1st, 2010, a Yahoo Voices^[20] article claimed the Minaj was exploiting sexual imagery and portraying black women as a "cold, nihilistic and misandric" in their sexuality. On June 2nd, 2010, Minaj was interviewed by Vibe^[21] magazine and discussed her sexual image:

"When I grew up I saw females doing certain things, and I thought I had to do that exactly. The female rappers of my day spoke about sex a lot . . . and I thought that to have the success they got, I would have to represent the same thing. When in fact I didn’t have to represent the same thing.”

On February 4th, 2011, a post titled "Why Nicki Minaj is the Most Annoying Person in Music Right Now" was published on the Phoenix New Times blog^[19] that criticized Minaj's Vibe interview claiming it showed a lack of respect to her direct influences like rapper Lil' Kim. A Facebook^[18] page for "I hate Nicki Minaj" has accumulated over 4,500 likes as of February 8th, 2012.

"Dan Nicky Your Bobbie s"

Dan Nicky Your Bobbie s is a meme based on a badly botched Instagram comment made in reply to a provocative selfie of celebrity Nicki Minaj posted in 2014. “Dan Nicky your Bobbie s” is clearly an attempt at typing “Damn Nicki, Your Boobies.” The phrase has been parodied by reformatting the phrase, and otherwise serves as an in-joke phrase for those in the know. More comments from Nicki Minaj’s Instagram similar to “Dan Nicky Your Bobbie s” have also become popular for their thirsty nature.

"Miley, What's Good?"

On August 30th, 2015, Nicki Minaj appeared on-stage at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony to accept her Best Hip Hop video award for Anaconda. Towards the end of her acceptance speech, Nicki turned to the event's host Miley Cyrus and openly confronted the pop singer for making disparaging comment about her regarding the former artist's Twitter feud with Taylor Swift in a New York Times interview. Immediately after the broadcast, many viewers on Twitter took note of the remark as a particularly memorable moment, particularly her rhetorical closer, "Miley, what's good?"

'And now… back to this bitch that had a lot to say about me in the press. Miley, what's good?"

On September 2nd, Miley Cyrus posted a series of photographs of her hosting the VMAs on her Instagram account. In the following hours, thousands of Instagram users flooded the comments section of her posts with the phrase "Miley, what's good?" in echoing Nicki Minaj's retort during the VMAs. The singer's Instagram flash mob commenting fiasco was subsequently picked up by BuzzFeed, Complex and many other celebrity news sites.

Personal Life

Minaj was born on December 8th, 1982 in a suburb of Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago. At the age of five she moved to the Queens borough of New Your City. Minaj's sexual orientation has been speculated about in news media. In a May 2010 interview in men's lifestyle magazine Details^[23], Minaj was referred to as an "openly bisexual rapper." On July 6th, 2010, a post on the hip-hop blog Vibe^[24] quoted Minaj saying "I feel like people always wanna define me and I don’t wanna be defined." On September 12th, 2010, the gay lifestyle magazine Out published an interview^[25] in which Minaj revealed that she did not "date women" or "have sex with women."

On July 5th, 2011, the New York Post^[26] reported that Minaj's cousin had been shot dead in Brooklyn, New York and that police had not yet determined why the shooting had occurred.