Over the past few years, Nicki Minaj has been one of the most exciting new voices in hip-hop. She's delivered a stream of song-stealing or song-saving guest verses, one dynamite mixtape (Beam Me Up Scotty) and another, as good, unofficial one (Barbie World), and generally displayed a swagger, unpredictability, and ferocity not heard from a female MC in years. Little of that, however, is on her long-awaited debut album, Pink Friday.
Minaj turned a lot of heads by coming out of the gate as a supremely confident, powerful MC in any one of the many guises she has chosen to inhabit. She's been most often bracketed with Lil' Kim, but those comparisons are more about image and sexuality than her music; at her best, Minaj on the mic is far closer to the free-spirited, without-a-net work of Missy Elliott. She displays a wide range of talents, stuffing her verses with complex internal rhymes, agile shifts in character and voice, and twisted, offbeat wordplay. Avoiding easy categorization on her mixtapes and guest verses, Minaj has played the coquette, the powerhouse, the lady, the diva, the rapper's rapper, the fembot, and the comedian. She's posed as Rihanna on the batshit awesome "Saxon", played the harajuku Barbie on "Beam Me Up Scotty", and shapeshifted into battle rapper mode on "Itty Bitty Piggy". And while she plays fast and loose with her past, her inclination to slip into a number of characters is the work of a creative former theater kid rather than a myth-making rapper.
And then her debut mainstream single, the rhythmically militaristic "Massive Attack", stiffed-- failing to chart on either the U.S. pop or rap charts. A few months later, the Annie Lennox-sampling hip-hop ballad "Your Love"-- a track she recorded a couple of years ago, most likely as a demo-- became an accidental hit, rising from an online leak to radio. And so now the woman who stole Kanye West's "Monster" from her all-star cohorts spends the bulk of her solo debut singing instead of rapping, leaning on recognizable and often corny 1980s/90s samples, and fronting a series of midtempo songs that inevitably lean into the string-led chorus so popular in R&B these days. In short: The most unpredictable voice in hip-hop decided she wanted to be like everyone else. Fortunately, even when she's aiming down the middle of the road, she's at least better than almost anyone else.
Minaj will get praise for her depth of skills, but this album isn't about showing off a range of talents-- it's about leaning on the ones that have worked in the marketplace. Oddly, she comes out of the gate with the album's most aggressive and most successful run of tracks, so livening up the clattering Swizz Beatz production "Roman's Revenge" that you're tempted to try to repeatedly get through it, even knowing that it contains Eminem recycling his Shady-circa-99 persona. The Bangladesh production "Did It on 'Em" is the record's best track, one of the few times Minaj goes to toe-to-toe with a huge beat. Minaj is upstaged by Drake and Kanye West on "Moment 4 Life" and "Blazin'", respectively, but these tracks-- plus the Rihanna collaboration "Fly" and the solo ballad "Save Me"-- are the best examples of what Pink Friday is rather than what many of us wanted it to be. That quartet of songs is proof that, even with commercial concessions, Minaj could have knocked out a great pop record, though one with anemic singles like "Check It Out" and "Right Thru Me" was never going to be it.