album review: 'pink friday 2' by nicki minaj

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Nicki Minaj can be her own worst enemy.

And it’s the big reason I find discussing her simultaneously fascinating and deeply frustrating, because for all of her talent and creativity - when she cares she can be a very good if not always great rapper, a better singer than she’s often given credit, and the architect of a formula for women in rap that has been relentless copied - her recorded output should be way better and more consistent than it is. And understanding why that’s the case is complicated: she came up in an era where women had been effectively driven out of mainstream rap - 2000s misogyny everyone - and thus she had to relentlessly play the noxious industry game in order to find any success, including more pop crossovers than was probably necessary. This led to albums that had tangible highs and real success, but also some astounding lows trying to cater to too many audiences or when Nicki didn’t care to engage, which is why I struggle to say she’s made a consistently great album.

That’s not saying she wasn’t influential or didn’t have a formula that worked… the problem became that by the late 2010s a lot of women started copying and improving on the formula en masse and Nicki did not initially take it well, showcasing a range of pettiness, insecurity, and desperation that was understandable but also wasn’t helping her. For as much as she wanted respect, leaning on the lyrical prowess and laurels she thought she earned after fighting for so long, I don’t think she was aware of how shaky her foundation, especially as the industry was pivoting away from the pop rap formula she pioneered… or rather, towards those artists who could handle it with less clout or drama in the streaming economy. And while Nicki would have further missteps here - see every collaboration with 6ix9ine and a wellspring of online drama and nonsense that never went dry - I figured that with every single getting pushed we’d eventually see a new album…

And then before we knew it over five years had passed since Queen in 2018, and I was increasingly sure that Nicki was getting mismanaged or stuck in a label deal with expectations that didn’t match the current messy reality of the music industry, to the detriment of her own unique artistic process. For God’s sake, ‘Super Freaky Girl’ went to #1 last year and it’s still included on this album, does nobody on her team have any grasp on the value of momentum, and if you were going to include that why not add ‘Do We Have A Problem’ beyond just leaving it on that Queen Radio compilation, given it was a much better song? And look, Nicki Minaj has never been great at structuring an album, and I get why this was set to be seventy minutes given that we haven’t gotten a new album in five years, and some of the features even seemed to make sense - Drake, Lil Wayne, Future, Skillibeng, even J. Cole - but her collaborations with Ariana Grande are some of her best and they compliment each other well, and instead of that we’re getting a Lourdiz feature on a Dr. Luke-produced song? What this meant is that while there are more songs in recent years that I like from Nicki than I expected, I could not set high expectations for this - I wanted to, Nicki Minaj is an artist I’ve wanted to like more for over a decade, and she normally gives me at least a few songs every album cycle that work, and being a bit more charitable is probably the only reason the Barbz don’t hate my guts more than average. But enough wasting time: how is Pink Friday 2?

…do you get the feeling that you might be trying too hard to like something… and that it shouldn’t be this hard at this point? Because after increasingly more listens, that was my experience with Pink Friday 2, an album that may feel more current to its era than Queen did, but for many of the worst reasons that made mainstream rap this year an utter headache. So I guess I have to give her some credit for capturing the zeitgeist, even if catching the tail end of it has me suspect the label was pushing this as far into a late release window to both get out of the way of competition and so it could be neatly ignored by critics and awards alike! And while following Queen I can say that Nicki Minaj albums are getting a little more consistent, they feel less special, and not remotely capable of paying off five years of hype!

And sadly, once again we have to start with structure, where I understand the logic of releasing seventy minutes of music - Nicki hasn’t dropped an album in years, she wants it to feel like an event, especially as a sequel to her debut, with several big features - but that works best if you think she’s building to a theme, or is amping up the production to present something more impressive; I have a lot of issues with the bloat and uneven pacing of Queen, but I can hear a loose arc and progression to reassert her presence at the top. What it means is that there should be a sonic or thematic core, you want the event to feel special… not just like an assortment of fragmented songs that could have been shoveled out to play the radio or streaming game at any time, a bloated tracklist borrowing from Drake’s stream-trolling, but enough pop rap concessions that the crossover game is built in. This is where the egregious sampling rears its ugly head, where you can tell that Nicki is playing towards the same formula that has worked with ‘Anaconda’ and ‘Super Freaky Girl’, with the biggest difference coming between her and Coi Leray is that Nicki has the budget for the big names. Hence why you get ‘Pink Friday Girls’ sampling ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ by Cyndi Lauper, or ‘My Life’ sampling ‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie, or the aforementioned ‘Super Freaky Girl’, or how ‘Everybody’ with Lil Uzi Vert samples ‘Move Your Feet’ by Junior Senior; I’ll freely admit that I’m not super-familiar with the original song - it was a more regional worldwide hit in the early 2000s than what I was listening to - so I don’t fully have the context for the negative uproar around this one, only that Nicki and Uzi have never complimented each other well and the sheer laziness of Uzi recycling ‘Just Wanna Rock’ highlights how much they didn’t care about this beyond the name recognition.

But that highlights something you’ll notice about this album very quickly: about two thirds of this album relies on a very obvious sample or a big guest star to grab attention, and it highlights the same massive problem Queen had in that you can tell these songs are built to stir buzz more than highlight Nicki’s performance or wordplay or content… and if you continuously claim you’re one of the best rappers in the world, you shouldn’t have to do that, you shouldn’t be playing the same game as Coi Leray, who shouldn’t be playing it either! And I’m not against using big, recognizable samples if you do something different with them or attempt to recontextualize them, which leads to my first contentious take: I don’t hate the flip of ‘when the party’s over’ by Billie Eilish for ‘Are You Gone Already’; even if the sample is overused across the song and it’s a terrible choice for an opener because it establishes no momentum and that the sampling will be gratuitous, getting Finneas to come back and produce it gives Nicki a great vocal mix for a really emotionally charged song about the hit-and-run death of her father and how her son will never know him but probably know too much about his mother, and how despite so much of her success she’s not happy. So it’s incredibly frustrating when the most followthrough from that opener for this album are the big samples, because in the very next track we get a very liberal sample of Biggie and Bone Thugz’ 1997 song ‘Notorious Thugs’ for ‘Barbie Dangerous, where she at least sounds more hungry but the song isn’t so dominant or impressive to ignore the sample, and by ‘FTHC’ with the obvious Waka Flocka Flame sample where she’s once again launching subs at other women in rap, you realize Nicki is very firmly in a comfort zone of which you’ve heard many times before, and it doesn’t feel special or grand.

So you run into a quandary: if you’re borrowing from Drake’s playbook of attention-chasing and just giving people what they think they want, it feels like I’m getting sold something that says it’s more important than it is, especially when a not-insignificant number of songs feel abbreviated for stream-trolling and TikTok, more flexing fragments than fully composed pieces - you get Murda Beatz for ‘Beep Beep’ that barely crossed ninety seconds, and of the two Boi-1da collabs, outside of the phoned-in Drake feature on ‘Needle’ the other song ‘Pink Birthday’ barely runs two minutes… and sounds like a chalky, runny mess? I dunno, if the extravagance is supposed to come in spending your budget recklessly for name producers to barely use them - or to pay Lil Wayne and Future for weak features, where for ‘Nicki Hendrix’ it’s a pretty bad Future song with an atrocious mix and a Nicki guest verse - that feels like a misstep too! Granted, when you also recognize this album was recorded over the course of five years and has a lot of scrapped fragments thrown together into songs that feel like glorified extras… well, again, it fits the zeitgeist - that was basically the story behind Travis Scott’s UTOPIA and people apparently liked that, and Nicki is at least a more interesting MC than Travis is, why wouldn’t it work? But all of this adds bloat, especially when Nicki Minaj rapping about sex and dissing other women - especially Latto - has really gotten stale, especially when she doesn’t sound like she’s enjoying any of it and it’s not particularly funny or witty or even creatively explicit. And while I’ve long had the suspicion Nicki has a conservative streak - of which she’s far from alone in rap including the men who contributed to this album and where the antivaxx nonsense only touches the tip of the iceberg; you could also mention her rigid belief in unquestionable hierarchies, her traditionalism, how she frames her interactions between men and women comparably on her level, all paired with a weird, regressive bitterness - and I’m not about to judge this album on what it doesn’t have, but it is revealing that after a year of Ice Spice collaborations, there are no other women who rap on this project, but an extended hook from Lourdiz on the utterly inert ‘Cowgirl’, who is most infamous in 2023 for her own career being a non-starter and because she’s associated with Dr. Luke taking a lot of shots at Kesha and her album this year - she also shows up for throwaway backing vocals on ‘Pink Friday Girls’, charming.

But maybe the issue is my standards: sure, this album is set up as a long-awaited sequel to Pink Friday and is her first album in five years, and the production is once again weirdly inconsistent by leaning heavily on recognizable samples and cheap-sounding trap percussion over a bloated runtime where many of these songs were known to be scrapped leftovers but probably there’s just enough of an idea to work on TikTok… but maybe that’s all it needs to be, and should be judged on that level; it’s not like that’s far removed from Drake’s formula these days and he rarely sounds like he’s having any fun. And yet Nicki does have moments on this album that I mostly like, beyond how ‘Do We Have A Problem’ should have been on the album as it would have been an easy highlight despite dropping nearly two years ago and Lil Baby’s hype seeming to dissipate. I think the album is bookended really well - I already mentioned appreciating ‘Are You Gone Already’ but ‘Just The Memories’ is a strong melancholic closer, looking back on the struggles in her life and how her new child centers her now. I’ve always been fond of ‘Red Ruby Da Sleeze’ and ‘Last Time I Saw You’, they’re strong singles playing to rap and pop, and even if the sample is obvious I like ‘Barbie Dangerous’. It might be cliche to say J. Cole has the best verse on the album - although it’s way closer than it should be - but the focus on strife within the family on ‘Let Me Calm Down’ is pretty well-realized, and it exposes snippets of what a more serious, focused, and mature Nicki Minaj could have made… but on the flipside, we’re not really getting the kooky, manic Nicki Minaj either, and if you’re framing this as a sequel to Pink Friday, defaulting to obvious trend-chasing instead of that feels like a mistake.

Look, in the end I want Nicki Minaj to have a better discography - there’s been a lot of revisionist history trying to paint her influential catalog as being way stronger and more consistent than it was, mostly because so many followed her formula to a lot of success. But being influential doesn’t always mean the quality is there, good ideas don’t always translate to good execution - look at everyone who tried to rip off Eminem or Drake or Lil Wayne over the years. And I don’t envy the position Nicki Minaj is in, because she continues to play the mainstream pop game, be it streaming or radio - keeping up with changing times is very difficult, especially if the current time in mainstream rap is pretty lousy! But Nicki is also at the point of her career where she could choose to shape and control the conversation rather than play along, and the fact that it’s trying to frame itself loudly as being so much more while it plays very safe creates a jarring, bloated experience. I don’t know if this is her worst album - people forget how much of an incoherent disaster Roman Reloaded is - but it’s her least essential, and as someone who was really trying to like this and will highlight the moments that work… it was a real disappointment, at least for me.