Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century: No. 13 — Nicki Minaj
With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. We’ve already named our Honorable Mentions and our No. 25, No. 24, No. 23, No. 22, No. 21, No. 20, No. 19, No. 18, No. 17, No. 16, No. 15 and No. 14 stars, and now we remember the century in Nicki Minaj — a one-of-a-kind crossover rapper who paved a superstar lane entirely her own in the 2010s.
Whether you know, love or tolerate her as Harajuku Barbie, Roman Zolanski, Chun-Li, Queen Sleeze or Martha (may she rest in peace) — few figures in 21st century popular music and culture (or hip-hop history in general) can compare to the towering impact and immense talent of Nicki Minaj.
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Though she came to passionately rep Southside Jamaica, Queens (and it’s crazy!) after moving there at the age of five, the artist born Onika Tanya Maraj was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago in 1982. The eldest daughter of four children, Minaj’s birthplace and stomping grounds immediately situate her at the origins of hip-hop, the endlessly influential artform that sprung out of 1970s New York thanks to the city’s rich combination of African-American, Afro-Caribbean and Latin American cultures. And just as so much of hip-hop has grappled (and continues to grapple) with the American dream and its dueling luster and infeasibility, so has Minaj throughout her career — both inside and outside of her music.
Ironically, these two truths align Minaj with traditional markers of hip-hop authenticity: a label that a significant chunk of the world has perceived her as at odds with for most of her career because of the communities – the girls and the gays – she has elected to cater to within hip-hop spaces. Minaj is arguably the single most fascinating MC of her generation; the combination of her razor-sharp wit, undeniable tenacity, irresistible penchant for the provocative and controversial, and, for better and for worse, her undying charisma have resulted in one of the most singular pop star careers of the 21st century.
Shortly after honing her acting skills by way of the storied Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Off-Broadway stint, Minaj briefly signed with Brooklyn R&B/hip-hop collective Full Force, through which she rapped as a part of The Hoodstars, a quartet that included her future beau-turned-hypeman-turned-critic, Safaree Samuels. She left the group after five songs – including WWE Diva Victoria’s 2004 entrance song, “Don’t Mess With” — taking to MySpace to begin fine-tuning her approach to social media and the Internet as an artist and get her music to ears of key industry players. One of those players was Dirty Money Entertainment CEO Big Fendi, who signed Minaj to the Brooklyn-based label in 2007, Minaj was signed to a 180-day contract and Fendi fatefully changed her stage name from Nicki Maraj to Nicki Minaj.
On July 5, 2007, Minaj unleashed her debut mixtape, the blistering Playtime Is Over. Playtime arrived three years before Minaj fashioned herself into a life-sized Barbie doll for the Pink Friday album cover, but she was already laying the groundwork for the imagery that would come to anchor her entire career. Minaj’s debut mixtape accompanied her appearance on Dirty Money’s The Come Up street DVD series, in which her swaggering rendition of shit-popping tracks like “40 Bars” caught the attention of Lil Wayne, who later signed her to his Young Money Entertainment imprint.
When Nicki conquered both the Internet and real-life hip-hop conversations with her 2007-09 mixtape run, the generation of female MCs before were effectively silent. For various reasons Lauryn Hill, Lil Kim, Da Brat, Eve, Foxy Brown, Missy Elliott, Amil, Remy Ma, Gangsta Boo and MC Lyte all hadn’t dropped solo studio albums since at least the first half of the ‘00s. Trina and Lil Mama made some chart impact, but otherwise, the latter half of the ‘00s and beginning of the ‘10s were largely bereft of female rappers operating in the genre’s mainstream as soloists in their own right. And here came Nicki Minaj pulling cards on her very first project: “How the f–k you in the game like ten years strong?/ You b–ches still can’t write ya own damn songs.”
Two more mixtapes followed – 2008’s Sucka Free (via Dirty Money/Young Money) and 2009’s Beam Me Up Scotty (via Young Money/Aphilliates) — but it was the latter that truly brought Minaj to the next level of her career. Scotty housed several of her most beloved tracks, including “Itty Bitty Piggy” and “I Get Crazy,” the latter of which marked her Billboard chart debut. The energy surrounding Minaj and Scotty was remarkably palpable; whether you were an NYC kid rapping her lyrics during lunch period or a blog-era disciple collecting her mixtapes online, all eyes were on Nicki Minaj. Through her, a new path forward for rap seemed possible for female artists – and she made it so.
In 2009, Portia Kirkland, then-VP of marketing at Mizay Entertainment (Minaj’s management company at the time) told Billboard, “We’re establishing her online first. Nicki always stays in touch with her fans through Twitter, MySpace and blogging. We didn’t position her as music but as a lifestyle.” It’s that approach to fan engagement, coupled with her undeniable talent, that have allowed Nicki and her Barbz to become one of the most passionate (if occasionally terrifying) artist-fan dynamics in music. Without that foundation, Nicki’s success across genres would be almost unimaginable, but, ultimately, that relationship is paramount to her (somewhat self-mythologized) position as a marquee pop star and general thought leader.
A few months after Scotty’s release, Minaj officially became the First Lady of Young Money, signing an impressive deal with Lil Wayne’s imprint and Universal Motown. The Pink Friday campaign would commence the following year, but not before she earned the first two of her record-breaking career 148 Billboard Hot 100 entries to date thanks to her appearances on Wayne’s “Knockout” and Mariah Carey’s “Up Out My Face.” The Pink Friday era started out a bit shaky, with the Sean Garrett-assisted “Massive Attack,” but paltry commercial returns caused that official lead single spot to go to the Annie Lennox-sampling “Your Love,” which reached No. 14 on the Hot 100.
Before Pink Friday arrived in its entirety on Nov. 22, 2010, Minaj built up her notoriety through a series of knockout guest verses – Trey Songz’s “Bottoms Up,” Usher’s “Lil Freak,” Sean Kingston’s “Letting Go” and a Grammy-nominated turn on Ludacris’ “My Chick Bad” — that established her as the go-to artist to inject a singular mixture of camp and sex appeal on virtually any song. Her verses were unabashedly animated and wholly electrifying; accent switches, a rotating cast of alter egos and slick wordplay proved to be hallmarks of a Nicki Minaj verse – and everyone wanted to prove they could rap a Nicki verse from memory. Throughout her career, Minaj’s brilliance has most consistently shined on her guest verses; something about a limited amount of space and time automatically makes her shift into a higher gear.
This pivotal feature run culminated in her culture-quaking verse on Kanye West’s “Monster,” her first truly iconic pop moment: From the second she commenced her verse, Nicki’s voice carried an undeniable gravity. Her fearless verse was packed with tongue-in-cheek ménage à trois requests and blood-curdling screams, but “$50k for a verse, no album out” was the kind of room-silencing flex that Minaj would continue to back up and build upon for years to come. The “Monster” verse cemented her as not just the next big thing, but also one of the most gifted working MCs.
Pink Friday eventually debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 375,000 copies sold in its first week, coming in behind West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which housed “Monster.” The album later reached the pole position, assisted by a stunning run of singles that included the Hot 100 hits: “Right Thru Me” (No. 26), “Moment for Life” (No. 13, with Drake), “Fly” (No. 19, with Rihanna), “Did It On ‘Em” (No. 49). Reaping a trio of Grammy nods – including best rap album and best new artist – Pink Friday unequivocally stands as a landmark album for 2010s hip-hop. Featuring a glossy blend of rap, pop, dance and R&B, Pink Friday marked a notable departure from the rap-focused trio of mixtapes it succeeded, which naturally courted a controversy that still plagues Minaj’s releases to this day. On her debut, Minaj rapped ferociously and sang earnestly – sometimes in the same song – a combination of skills that, coupled with the sparkly beats of Drew Money, Swizz Beatz, and Pop & Oak, confounded those who encountered her on a vibe closer to The Come Up DVD.
What remains so striking about Pink Friday is that it simultaneously feels like an album made distinctly for Nicki Minaj and album intentionally made for a generation of female rappers that hadn’t yet arrived. “I felt like I had something to prove to everyone who said a female rapper could not make an album unless she was talking about her p—y,” she told Vibe in 2012. “So, I went above and beyond to prove that I could not talk about sex and not talk about my genitalia and still have a successful album. And I proved that.” Interestingly, as much as Pink Friday found Minaj looking out for her future peers (“’Cause before they could begin, you told ’em it was the end/ But I am here to reverse the curse that they live in”), the album also found her twisting the knife in the chest of one of her foremothers, Lil Kim, responding to the Brooklyn rapper’s accusations that she copied her style and image on the fiery Eminem team-up “Roman’s Revenge.”
Nicki’s previous pop crossover attempts had reaped relatively middling returns, but “Super Bass” — originally placed as a Pink Friday deluxe track, before receiving an official single release in 2011 — sent her into the stratosphere. Thanks to its relentlessly sticky hook and an impromptu cover of the song by Taylor Swift during an interview with a Nashville radio station, “Bass” eventually peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100 and earned a Diamond certification from the RIAA. Not only did the song help Minaj crash through Top 40’s front doors, it’s also still considered to be one of the greatest pop songs of all time, coming in at No. 13 on Billboard’s list of the 500 Best Pop Songs. From the candy-coated music video and her trademark pink wig to her cheeky choreography and suggestive bars, “Super Bass” was the ultimate culmination of Nicki Minaj as a bonafide pop star and topline rapper, a balancing act she would continue for the next ten years.
“Y’all hate fun,” is a phrase often thrown around in online spaces to laud works that people may enjoy regardless of their quality. With Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, her sophomore studio album, Minaj wasn’t using “fun” as a cop-out, she genuinely just wanted to enjoy herself after executing a seismic hip-hop moment amid her transition to pop music’s upper echelon. In 2012, she told Ryan Seacrest during a call-in interview, “I’ve never had this much fun recording music in my life. My first album I was very guarded. I felt like I was making music to please everyone else. I had to be politically correct, but this album I am just creating music, and there’s such a big difference.”
In that freedom, Minaj sourced her Pink Friday follow-up: a double album that balanced her hip-hop side with her desire to delve deeper into EDM and dance-pop. She traded her Harajuku Barbie aesthetic for neon paint and bikinis galore as she pushed hip-hop further to where the zeitgeist was at the time, nimbly flowing over blaring synth breakdowns and delivering delectable pop hooks to boot. Lead single “Starships” reached No. 5 on the Hot 100, bridging rap and Europop to set the stage for later singles such as “Pound the Alarm” (No. 15) and the deluxe edition’s “Va Va Voom” (No. 22). Minaj’s dance-pop pivot was a critical moment in her career.
Despite what she and Pink Friday did for hip-hop just months prior, her decision to experiment with her sound and further flaunt her versatility was met with haughty dismissal and harsh disrespect by some fans, peers and industry players. Infamously, Hot 97 radio host Peter Rosenberg lambasted “Starships” as “not real hip-hop,” at the station’s annual Summer Jam concert on the day she was scheduled to perform at MetLife Stadium, spurring Minaj to cancel her headlining appearance. Perhaps, Minaj’s experimentation proved too radical for hip-hop – the Barbie aesthetic was one thing, but what were gatekeepers supposed to do with RedOne productions that sounded closer to Calvin Harris than the ricocheting snares of Mike Will Made-It?
As hurtful as the backlash was, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded became Minaj’s first album to debut at No. 1, selling 253,000 copies in its first week. Meanwhile, Minaj collaborated with some pop music’s biggest names – Alicia Keys (“Girl on Fire”), Justin Bieber (“Beauty and a Beat”) and Madonna (“Give Me All Your Luvin’”) — which helped keep her a consistent presence across radio formats as discourse around her own music continued to swirl. That Madonna collaboration brought Minaj all the way to the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show, which aired just one week before the most controversial performance of Minaj’s career to date: At the 2012 Grammys, Minaj performed “Roman Holiday” in a set that found her Roman Zolanski alter-ego overcoming an exorcism attempt. The performance drew the ire of The Catholic League, and years later, Minaj alleged that former Grammy producer Ken Ehrlich blackballed her from ever winning an award at the show because of the performance’s sour reception and her refusal to pull out from the show, following his last-minute request to do so in light of Whitney Houston’s passing. (After 12 career nominations, Minaj still has yet to take home a Grammy.)
Two other songs from Roman Reloaded also helped cement Minaj as an A-list pop star during this era: “Stupid Hoe” and “High School” (with Lil Wayne). The former once again found Minaj hurling jabs at Lil Kim, and its colorful music video broke the Vevo record at time with 4.8 million views in its first 24 hours of release. “High School,” which remains one of Minaj’s most beloved tracks, found her its music video to introduce Myx Moscato, a product in a Minaj co-owned line of alcoholic drinks that she would regularly reference in her verses for years to come, marking her transition from hot new star to budding mogul. In this era, Minaj also reunited with Carey as the two served on the judging panel for a particularly tense season of American Idol and returned to acting with a voice role in Ice Age: Continental Drift, the highest-grossing animated film of 2012.
Like any smart pop star, when Minaj’s back got shoved against the wall, she went back to basics. She kicked off 2014 with what was arguably her most fondly looked upon collection of remixes and guest verses: “Lookin Ass,” YG’s “My N—a,” “Danny Glover” (with Young Thug), “Chi-Raq” (with G-Herbo), “No Flex Zone” (with Rae Sremmurd),” and Young Money’s “Senile,” among others. Those new tracks ushered Minaj into her most dramatic change in fashion and aesthetic yet: For the red carpets celebrating the release of Nick Cassavetes’ rom-com The Other Woman, her live-action feature film debut, Minaj hung up the heavy makeup and zany colored wigs of her past two eras and instead opted for a strikingly natural look. Her highly lauded new looks set the stage for The Pinkprint, her remarkably personal third studio album.
Led by the somber, revelatory “Pills N Potions,” The Pinkprint marked a moment of significant maturation for Minaj. She spent the record working through family trauma (“All Things Go”) and detailing the most harrowing parts of failed relationships (“I Lied”; “The Crying Game”), while also finding time to rep her heritage (“Trini Dem Girls,” “Four Door Aventador”). The sprawling set reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200, shifting 244,000 album units in its first week, while also spawning additional top 40 hits like the Drake/Wayne link-ups “Only” (No. 12, with Chris Brown) and “Truffle Butter” (No. 14), and “The Night Is Still Young” (No. 31) — one of her few post-Roman Reloaded solo dance-pop tracks.
But the biggest hit from the album was easily “Anaconda” — which, between its iconic music video, cover art and outro, remains one of the most remembered tracks of both The Pinkprint and Minaj’s career in general. Her flip of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” forced open a Pandora’s box of discourse regarding body politics, Black feminism, and white women and victimhood as it relates to Taylor Swift centering herself in Minaj’s questioning of why her wildly successful music video was passed over for top honors at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. Of course, Swift was instrumental in helping “Super Bass” cross over to pop audiences back in 2010, so the duo’s kerfuffle was nothing that a joint performance opening that year’s VMAs couldn’t fix. 2014 also found Minaj joining forces with Beyoncé and Ariana Grande — the two hottest non-Swift pop stars of the year – both as guests on her own album, then as co-stars on the former’s world-stopping “Flawless” remix and the latter’s “Bang Bang” (along with Jessie J).
Between dominating the summer with “Anaconda” and “Bang Bang” and closing out the year with The Pinkprint, 2014 was a winning year for Minaj. That success continued into the following year with the release of Barbershop: The Next Cut, another live-action film that helped insert Minaj into both the legacy of the beloved film series and the lineage of rappers-turned-actors like her co-stars Eve, Ice Cube and Common. Although The Pinkprint lost all four of its Grammy nods, the album did wonders for those who were still seeking a solid, authentic album from Minaj – and it even previewed where she was headed in her love life (peep those two Meek Mill collabs).
After The Pinkprint, something shifted. With three successful albums and two proper world tours under her belt, Minaj was no longer a bright-eyed new star. She was now lounging on the throne in the house she built, but there were quite a few new and veteran female rappers looking to get some skin in the game. Minaj’s worst trials would come in 2017. After kicking off the year announcing her split from Meek Mill – who she later accused of physical violence against women, including herself, in 2020 – Minaj received a little gift by the name of “Shether.”
Named in reference to “Ether,” Nas’ legendary 2001 diss track, “Shether” was a scathing seven-minute diss towards Nicki Minaj from Bronx rapper Remy Ma. The pair’s beef dates back to 2010, but “Shether” quickly transcended their specific shared history. Through “Shether,” anyone who didn’t like Minaj – or was just plain tired of her dominance – was granted both an avenue to exercise that hate and a rival artist to support in spite of her. The well-received “Shether” was the first diss track to truly put a dent in Minaj’s armor: Although she did respond through “No Frauds,” Nicki survived the lashings mostly by continuing to churn out hits.
But not even a force of nature could thwart the clearly changing tides of the industry: “Shether” dropped just three and a half months before Cardi B’s Hot 100-topping “Bodak Yellow.” With Cardi’s rise soon giving way to a new class of rising female emcees and Remy’s diss still stinging, the Head Barb found herself in a wildly different position from the lane she had cultivated for the past decade. 2017 also marked the first time after a seven-year run that Minaj didn’t win best female hip-hop artist at the BET Awards (Remy won). The foundation of Minaj’s world had shifted significantly.
She kicked off 2018 with another breakup – this time with fellow Queens icon Nas – and quickly turned her attention to rolling out Queen, her fourth studio album. Lead single “Chun-Li” (No. 10) became her first solo Hot 100 top 10 hit since “Anaconda” and previewed an album that would inject Minaj’s hip-hop foundation with notes of trap, pop, R&B and dancehall. Although she put out dual lead singles and a handful of pre-release tracks, Queen felt like the first Nicki Minaj era where everything but the music was at the center of attention. She launched Queen Radio on Apple Music to coincide with the album drop, but the stop-start nature of the release gave way to attention-grabbing rants that would quickly become a defining characteristic of the radio show – and Minaj’s general late ‘10s and early ‘20s online presence.
Queen opened at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, falling behind the second week of Travis Scott’s Astroworld. Naturally, an album that bears an honorific as its title missing the top spot and earning a smaller debut than Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy (2018) was far from ideal – and Minaj spent the following weeks casting blame on everyone from her record label to Billboard, streaming services, Travis Scott, Irving Azoff and even Stormi Webster. It also didn’t help that – outside of “Chun-Li” — Queen failed to generate any real hits of its own. In fact, the biggest hit of this Nicki era is technically “FEFE,” a Murda Beatz-produced collaboration with embattled rapper 6ix9ine that peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100 and was tacked onto the album’s deluxe edition. Couple that with Future dropping out of his planned co-headlining tour with Nicki – he was later replaced by Juice WRLD — and the Queen era was easily Nicki’s messiest yet. Did we mention that Fashion Week altercation with Cardi?
It would take another half-decade for Minaj’s next studio album to arrive, and in the interim, she rode out the most confounding period of her career yet. 2019 brought her massive records like “Tusa” (with Karol G) and smart remixes like “Welcome to the Party” (with Pop Smoke), but her link-up with Megan Thee Stallion on that year’s “Hot Girl Summer” proved to have a quite mind-boggling snowball effect. Their collaboration ended, though — as did her 2017 collab with Cardi B on “Motorsport,” which also featured Migos — with the two rappers at odds.
While Bardi and Minaj have still yet to spar on record, the events of the “Hot Girl Summer” music video shoot – Minaj alleges that Thee Stallion tried to force her to drink while she was trying to get pregnant — later gave way to 2024’s “Big Foot,” a poorly received response to Megan’s Hot 100-topping “Hiss.” In “Hiss,” Megan rapped, “These hoes don’t be mad at Megan, these hoes mad at Megan’s Law,” a bar many perceived to be a shot at Minaj, whose husband, Kenneth Petty, is a registered sex offender. Though it was a general shot that could be directed to a number of Thee Stallion’s adversaries, most minds went to Nicki.
Though 2020 might have been the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, for Nicki, it mainly marked a return to commercial triumph amid her puzzling dissemination of vaccine conspiracy theories. She earned her first two Hot 100 chart-toppers: “Say So” (with Doja Cat), the first collaboration between two female rappers to top the chart, and “Trollz” (with 6ix9ine). In 2021, she re-released Beam Me Up Scotty to streaming services, earning a No. 2 Billboard 200 peak for the decade-old mixtape in the process.
By the time 2022 rolled around, Minaj seemed to swing the pendulum back in her favor, earning her first unaccompanied Hot 100 No. 1 with the Rick James-sampling “Super Freaky Girl.” The viral track repurposed the “Anaconda” formula and gifted Minaj her biggest crossover hit in years, which then gave way to her earning the Video Vanguard and best hip-hop awards at a victory-lapping 2022 VMAs. “Super Freaky Girl” was also the center of another brouhaha between Minaj and a younger female MC: This time, she sounded off about “Super” being placed in the pop field instead of the rap field at the 2023 Grammys. On Instagram Live – which she frequently uses along with Stationhead to corral her fan army and speak her mind – Minaj argued that both her song and Latto’s “Big Energy” should compete in the pop field because they have the same producer (Dr. Luke, another Minaj collaborator with troubling sexual assault allegations – he countersued and the two later settled out of court).
“Super Freaky Girl” would go on to serve as the de facto lead single for Pink Friday 2, but not before Minaj began 2023 with a remix of Ice Spice’s “Princess Diana,” which served as the first release on Heavy On It Records, an imprint she launched through a venture with Republic Records that year, and reached No. 4 on the Hot 100. She and Ice would later reunite on the No. 7-peaking “Barbie World” (with AQUA) — the two-time Grammy-nominated track from Barbie the Album – before their relationship turned icy. On December 8, 2023, Minaj released Pink Friday 2, an official sequel to her 2010 debut that combined hip-hop with Afrobeats, Jersey club, dancehall and pop. The LP became her record-breaking third No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, earning over 228,000 album equivalent units in its first week. Over half of the album charted on the Hot 100, including the singles “Red Ruby Da Sleeze” (No. 13), “Last Time I Saw You” (No. 23), “Everybody” (No. 24, with Lil Uzi Vert) and “FTCU” (No. 15). Received warmly by critics and fans alike, Pink Friday 2 mined nostalgia to handsome returns, culminating in the highest-grossing concert tour by a female rapper of all time with the Pink Friday 2 World Tour.
For Minaj, 2024 has been marked by the continuation of her Pink Friday 2 trek and the creation of the forthcoming third installment in her Pink Friday album series. With a career that spans two decades across the hip-hop underground and pop’s apex alike, Nicki Minaj has been the ultimate victor, villain, and survivor of 21st-century pop music and culture – sometimes all at the same time. A provocateur in the truest sense (her most famous alter ego’s name, Roman Zolanski, bears a striking similarity to that of film director and convicted sex offender Roman Polanski — though she claims there’s “no relation”), Minaj knows what buttons to press and she’s always ready to Hulk smash them – she’s fearless in that way. But with the threat of being replaced always looming for any veteran artist at her level, she continues demanding the spotlight like any great pop star; watching her grapple with that battle is a priceless front-row seat to the madhouse that is 21st-century fame.
Nicki Minaj isn’t just the greatest female rapper to ever do it and one of the greatest pop stars of this century, she’s also one of the key architects of how pop music sounds, how pop fandom functions and how pop stars are perceived both online and in real life in 2024. Now that’s some single-handed annihilation, word to “Itty Bitty Piggy.”
Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back on Thursday when our No. 12 artist is revealed!
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