Nicki Minaj – The Pinkprint first-listen review: 'She has no idea what her strengths are'

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/dec/12/nicki-minaj-the-pinkprint-first-listen-review

Version 0 of 1.

All Things Go

The opening track of Nicki Minaj’s last album, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded found her ricocheting between about 12 different voices, accents and characters, mimicking an exorcism by growling in guttural tongues and interpolating O Come All Ye Faithful over a beat that sounded like a possessed typewriter. By contrast, All Things Go consists of deep thoughts over barely-existent synth wisps delivered in clipped, serious-faced tones. From reminiscing about a relationship (more – oh, a lot more – of which later) to mourning her murdered cousin, there’s a lot for Nicki to be emo about. Unfortunately, it’s also a drizzly trudge to listen to: for all that Minaj can sound forced when contorting herself into outré new personae, she never sounds more stilted than when she’s trying to play it straight.

I Lied

Sometime this year, Minaj allegedly split from her alleged boyfriend of 10 years, Safaree Samuels – a relationship she’s kept so private that she barely acknowledged him in public. There are still no names mentioned here, but it’s shaping up to be Nicki Minaj’s break-up album: All Things Go alluded to it, and I Lied is a full-on ballad of complicated regret. Well, Minaj’s emotions may be complicated, but Mike Will Made It’s torpid beat raises neither temperature nor tempo, and Minaj was clearly too overcome by her sad feelings to write a decent chorus: this one lists around in search of a hook before evaporating in a puff of embarrassment.

The Crying Game (feat. Jessie Ware)

At this point in my first listen to Roman Reloaded, my brain felt like it had been turned into exclamation marks. Three tracks into The Pinkprint, I’m sliding off the sofa with boredom. A sinuous guitar line provides a flicker of interest before it morphs into a buzzsaw; crashing drums at the end attempt to manufacture drama out of nothing; Minaj continues to pore over the minutiae of her dead relationship and in conclusion delivers, with quite unwarranted sombre meaningfulness, a cliché about loving and to be loved. And as nice as it is to hear Jessie Ware’s voice, and as exciting as the idea of a Ware/Minaj collaboration was, let’s be real: her underwritten chorus isn’t going to go down as an essential moment in her catalogue, either.

Get On Your Knees (feat. Ariana Grande)

Minaj opening with the purr from The Boys, one of her most underrated singles, is The Pinkprint’s first sign of life, and – blessed relief – with Get On Your Knees, Emo Nicki finally takes her leave. She’s still brooding and clipped, but more in a prowling, predatory way as she and Ariana Grande turn the tables on a year of bro-R&B and demand cunnilingus of potential suitors. There’s no playfulness here: it’s a pure power move. Grande, oddly, gets the best lines: “Before I let you walk, you gotta show me how you crawl,” dismissing the eternally useless sad boy culture in the chorus. But the song doesn’t reach the heights it should. Grande sounds parachuted in from a different song and oblivious to her surroundings, although given that the song was originally intended for Katy Perry’s album, perhaps we dodged a bullet anyway. Pity Nicki couldn’t find the time to reword the song: her shout-out to Perry when she should be ushering in Grande is awkward for all involved.

Feeling Myself (feat. Beyoncé)

Ah, this is what we expect on a Nicki Minaj album: crazed voices, declarations of superiority that vibrate with outrage, unexpected shifts between menacing calm and multi-layered chorales. And they’re all courtesy of Beyoncé, continuing her post-masterpiece celebrations of wilding out over bizarro beats in style. Nicki and Bey don’t so much ride this beat, which mostly consists of a nagging whistle, as make it bend in accordance with the whims of their voices: “I stop the world!” Beyoncé crows. “World, stop!” she commands, and in the ensuing pause you can almost hear her smirk. “Carry on.” Like Minaj’s remix of Beyoncé’s Flawless, Feeling Myself is bit of a mess that does away with structure and sense - this isn’t a bad thing, necessarily - but the scattershot sensory overload that’s been Minaj’s trademark to date has been sorely missing from The Pinkprint, and this is the first track that brings it.

Only (feat. Drake, Lil’ Wayne & Chris Brown)

And the album crashes into the ground again. Usually, Nicki uses the presence of inferior male MCs as a launching pad for greatness. Drake and Lil’ Wayne surely set the bar low enough – the former masturbating uncontrollably in public (please, never make your voice squeak on the word “titties” again), the latter mumbling incoherently like your creepy grandpa. Both pay lip service to Minaj’s central point, that she didn’t fuck her way to the top, but somehow manage to undermine it anyway via entitlement to her body. Meanwhile, she undermines herself with some of her most torturous puns and the worst “girls are my sons” punchline to date.

Want Some More

Nicki pulling funny faces and veering into doubletime flow over a Zaytoven beat: this is, in theory, what I’ve been craving from this album. But even here, she seems to be going through the motions: nothing unexpected happens at any point during Want Some More. A pall has settled over The Pinkprint, in stark contrast to the gleeful barrage of head-spinning ideas that was the first third of Roman Reloaded. What’s also sad is that Minaj began 2014 at the top of her game, releasing a stream of remixes, one-off tracks and guest spots that showed her at her most laser-focused and unstoppable - not to mention pissed off, especially with men. Everything pointed to The Pinkprint being a triumph, yet none of the spirit of those one-offs is really present here.

Four Door Aventador

Namedropping Shia LaBeouf as evidence of your Hollywood star power is strange to say the least. Nonetheless, the best track yet, and one that’ll have Lil’ Kim seething: ever since Nicki emerged, Kim’s accusations that the younger woman has copied her have come thick and fast – and not always accurately, given how fundamentally different the two rappers’ personae are. Four Door Aventador is the most Kim-like track Nicki has ever put her name to, from the sour snap of her tone to the Mafia imagery to the bumping, humming, low-key beat reminiscent of Kim’s 2003 deep cut Tha Beehive. It’s possibly instructive to compare The Pinkprint to that song’s parent album, La Bella Mafia: both surprisingly subdued follow-ups to zany, technicolour hip-pop second albums (making Roman Reloaded the parallel of The Notorious K.I.M.), both released in the wake of long-term relationships crumbling (Kim famously split with her Junior M.A.F.I.A. crew after seven years in 2001). Let’s hope that, like La Bella Mafia, The Pinkprint has saved its best for its second half.

Favorite (feat. Jeremih)

Yet another midtempo R&B number that does absolutely nothing to pique the interest. Neither Nicki nor Jeremih seem to be making any effort. I’ve listened to this three times in a row and nothing, aside from the plinky beat, has stuck.

Buy A Heart (feat. Meek Mill)

A song that sums up what an unfortunate venture The Pinkprint is turning out to be: originally a Meek Mill demo, the R&B singer K Michelle was inspired enough to name her new album, Anybody Wanna Buy A Heart?, after it – but her version never made the final cut. Enter Nicki Minaj, whose lack of quality control apparently deems an inferior remix of another artist’s offcut based on yet another artist’s song acceptable for her own album. Worse, K Michelle’s rejected version easily trumps this, mostly because K Michelle sounded a good deal more invested in the song’s themes of heartbreak and numbness. Anybody Wanna Buy A Heart? is also the superior break-up album: whenever Minaj opens her heart, there’s a sense of going through the motions, of carefully hitting conventional spots, whereas K Michelle is all unfiltered blood and guts, cursing the world as she tears everything around her down. Indeed, a Nicki Minaj/K Michelle collaboration is probably the most necessary outcome of all of this.

Trini Dem Girls (feat. Lunchmoney Lewis)

Finally. Nicki’s dancehall side is seriously under-utilised, given how consistently she’s peaked with it, from Beam Me Up Scotty to Hold Yuh (Remix) to Gun Shot. I’m out of my chair and dancing around the kitchen for the first time during the album: those echoing handclaps bring back happy memories of the classic Diwali Riddim. Meanwhile, the chorus, which sounds dropped in from the kind of blaring RedOne production that’s been absent from The Pinkprint so far, does a fine job of eliding Island Nicki and Pop Nicki (à la her decision to give the Pound the Alarm video a Trinidad carnival setting) – two sides of Minaj that can seem diametrically opposed, but which both seem to have the effect of cutting her brashness loose.

Anaconda

It’s remarkable how much better this album makes Anaconda sound: it’s a blast of shameless vulgarity in an album curiously short on it (in terms of performance and sound, not just its words). As a song listened to sober and alone, it still goes on twice as long as it strictly needs to and feels somewhat haphazardly structured, but as a party track it’s an unstoppable force, with those fire verses coming into their own. The thinkpieces have been done to death by now, but I for one appreciate how quickly Minaj can flip from “stop looking at my ass” (on Lookin’ Ass) to “oh/ my/ God/ look at her butt” here: appreciation of her body and bodies like it, with the sexuality that implies, but on her terms and not exclusively reducing herself to it. Minaj’s relationship to the heterosexual male gaze is neither straightforward rejection nor submission, but rather playing with it on a whim, as a cat might play with a mouse.

The Night Is Still Young

The trashy dance section of Roman Reloaded was much maligned initially, including by me, but I caved in to Starships and Pound the Alarm in the end, mostly because of booze. This perfunctory nod to that style is like revisiting the sites of your drunkenness through a hungover fug the following night in a doomed attempt to recapture the magic. No one’s heart is in this, everyone just wants a quiet, contemplative night in instead.

Pills N Potions

But not this kid of quiet night in. This execrable single is where the wheels started to come off Nicki’s 2014 and time has not improved it one jot. A third of its running time is comprised of a hook that’s more like a space-filling ad lib; one of the biggest reasons Nicki Minaj’s slow songs don’t work is because the woman has no idea how to write a chorus beneath a certain tempo, and thinks honking “I STILL LOVE I STILL LOVE I STILL LUH UH UH” through Auto-Tune ad infinitum will suffice.

Bed Of Lies (feat. Skylar Grey)

For once, Minaj seems to have put some thought into structuring an album. But when the arc has gone from boring break-up mush through varying levels of disappointment back to boring break-up mush, you start longing for Roman Reloaded’s incoherent scattershot randomness. Jobbing industry songwriter Skylar Grey outdoes herself with a particularly stupid metaphor about thread counts in the song’s bridge.

Grand Piano

The idea of Nicki Minaj closing an album with a full-on torch song would be more tantalising had that album not been as much of a slog as The Pinkprint. Nice violin, but this song is so underwritten lyrically and melodically that it feels less like an emotional climax and more of an afterthought; Minaj’s careful, by-the-book and by-the-autotune performance doesn’t exactly sell it, either.

Big Daddy (feat. Meek Mill)

Of course the album jolts into life with the bonus tracks, of course it does. An aggressive Meek Mill going hard over a demented fairground beat is one of the best sounds in rap, and Nicki raises her own ferocity levels to match him. Target, enjoyably: Iggy Azalea.

Shanghai

Is this sinogrime? It’s the best beat yet, synthesised zithers and wonky digital oscillations leaning in and out of each other, sprinkled with odd squelches and percussion like water droplets; a violin emerges from nowhere to brilliant effect in the closing 20 seconds. Nicki carries on shit-talking where she left off on Big Daddy, circling the beat like the classic NYC battle rapper that she is deep down before letting herself sink into a hypnotic, drug-induced stupor: “Pop pills, now we Shanghai, Shanghai, Shanghai …”

Win Again

This is why we crave Mixtape Nicki: Win Again is a pretty standard example of the form, but the confidence and attitude on show is enough to carry it. Minaj doesn’t say anything she hasn’t said before, but she rages her way through it like a whirling dervish and ends by threatening to kill everything in her way.

Mona Lisa

If Nicki really wanted to make a sombre, serious break-up album, why couldn’t it all have sounded like this? One of the strangest tracks she’s put her name to, Mona Lisa is less a narrative or a song and more snatches of post-break-up mental detritus deformed almost to the point of intelligibility floating through space. (The latter comes courtesy of Drunk in Love producer Detail, and there’s a cushiony depth to his beat that most of the submarine synths usually deployed for Sad Rap Feelings lack.) Mirroring the previous track, Mona Lisa also ends with Nicki threatening murder – “I don’t wanna fight but I’ll fuck around and end your life” – but this time delicately and sadly (shades of rising Chicago rapper Dej Loaf and her breakthrough hit Try Me here). It’s a more emotional and convincing depiction of Minaj’s post-break-up state of mind than any of her more deliberate efforts on the main album, that’s for sure.

Put You In a Room

As is this odd sing-song bonus: it’s a curio, not a classic, but the spontaneity of Minaj’s lyrics here are a welcome contrast to the rigidity of what she thinks a confessional album should be elsewhere. If nothing else, the chorus is thought-provokingly odd: “Put you in a room/ You don’t have to leave/ But you can’t sleep with me.” Physical abduction? Mental closure? Another reiteration that Minaj’s sexuality exists only on her terms?

Truffle Butter (feat. Drake & Lil Wayne)

Of all the samples to pop up on a Nicki Minaj record, I definitely wasn’t expecting Maya Jane Coles’ brilliant 2010 house anthem What They Say, but here we are - and after a slog like this, it’s most welcome. Drake, Nicki and Wayne all begin their verses, “Thinkin’ out loud,” and if they’re not actual freestyles they’re convincing imitations of such; it’s telling that in relaxed, spontaneous mode all three are so much less tiresome than on their official triple collaboration here. Pruning a 22-track Nicki Minaj album down to an EP’s worth of bangers isn’t an unexpected task, but even by those standards The Pinkprint is a let-down – and while Minaj might be the most exciting pop star around at her best, her insistence on confining her best work to random internet freebies and bonus tracks indicates that even after this long, she either has no idea what her strengths are or still hasn’t worked out how to present them to the public.