One of the stand-out qualities of The Pinkprint, Nicki Minaj’s third studio album, is how plainly it illustrates a woman in her early 30s going through the ringer that women in their early 30s do: a time of transition, she details not just her recent breakup with her boyfriend of a decade, but also the kind of career and family choices we tend to consider intimately once we’re thrust in our fun-ass third decade. Minaj confirmed as much in an intimate, hour-and-a-half-long interview in New York Tuesday night, elaborating on those and many other topics more than she ever has before.
As part of the #CRWN interview series created and conducted by veteran hip-hop journalist Elliott Wilson, Minaj appeared on a stage to about 300 at the West Village club Le Poisson Rouge, wearing a hooded fox-fur vest and a sheer, black-dotted crop top. She and Wilson sat in gold-plated seats made to look like thrones, and the audience was comprised of some of Minaj’s most devoted New York fans, the ones who know every word to every mixtape and DVD cut.
Before the interview began, the venue played The Pinkprint, which leaked late last week, and most of said fans already knew about 70 percent of the words—”Feelin Myself,” “Four Door Aventador,” and “Trini Dem Girls” popped off the most. Through some magical confluence of Wilson’s questions, the crowd’s vocal support and, perhaps, Minaj feeling truly supported, she gave what was most certainly the best interview I’ve ever seen conducted with her, and not just because she juiced it up by rapping the occasional a cappella verse here and there.
The interview began with Wilson asking about The Pinkprint, of course, saying he felt that with it she was “able to balance the diversity of everything that you are as an artist.” She responded,
I definitely found my niche, I’m not chasing anything, I’m just doing me… The Pinkprint was just about me showing what the culture should be about. I think the culture should be about skill. Practice makes perfect, and I really worked at that: whether hearing a beat, knowing what my audience wanted from me, knowing what kinds of beat I shined on.
But The Pinkprint begins with the intimate song “All Things Go,” a confessional track in which Minaj details feeling guilt over family matters and laments an unborn baby lost to either miscarriage or an abortion, so she soon delved into more personal issues.
It was so very, very scary. The second verse, I was talking about my little cousin who died, and I had never, ever spoken about that. I remember the last time I saw him, he told me how uncomfortable he felt by how people were treating me. He was like, don’t let nobody come around and use you… he was so overprotective of me, but he was goin’ through all this craziness, like niggas was really trying to kill him. Now, when I think about him, I just keep thinking like, why didn’t he tell me? I had never expressed my guilt to anyone. So after I wrote it, it was hard for me to listen back. I love that song, but I hate it, too. Every time I listen to it, I feel like I relive it. So that’s the only difficult thing about writing things that are very personal. Like, you’re gonna have to relive it for the rest of your life. Are you really gonna be okay with reliving that moment, reliving that guilt, reliving that pain. But then if you don’t write it, it feels like you’re not being completely honest. I wanna remember where I was in my life right now. Ten years from now, I wanna listen to The Pinkprint and remember what I was feeling.
Wilson pressed Minaj about the third verse, about her mother and the child. “It’s very difficult,” she said. “It’s something that I put in the back of my mind for so many years, and I guess… I know a lotta women can identify with feeling like, ‘If I forget about it, it’s almost like it didn’t happen.'”
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