Album Review: Pink Friday 2 by Nicki Minaj
No ideas, no vision, no hunger: creative shock rigidity. This album is awful.
In 2010, Nicki Minaj released Pink Friday. Although it had certain errors that prevented it from reaching good quality, this album was successful in showing Nicki as a rising name in the charismatic rap scene. Perhaps this album was far from being one of the best hip-hop works of that year; however, it was a start to the rapper’s career that managed to showcase her great talent well. 13 years have passed, and now the Trinidadian releases Pink Friday 2, the sequel to her debut, however, for an album that would function as the second part of one of her most important projects, it doesn’t do justice to its predecessor.
I remember a time when Nicki Minaj was a more revolutionary musician. An over-MC feature killer who switches to pop star mode at will, who could give the opinion of meatheads like Wayne and Drake. She crowned herself the “Queen of Rap” by default after Pink Friday with absolute right. And then? Suppose Operation Nicki Minaj had no other program than “These b*tches is my sons” for ten years, ten years of mediocre music and quarrels with every other woman in hip-hop. In that case, the cosmos has not exactly inspired creative growth. The fact that the sequel Pink Friday 2 should now be no less than the “best album of their lives” aroused cause for skepticism. Nevertheless, no one would have expected such an exorbitantly confused and unsettled work.
It is interesting to highlight that this album already seemed strange in the promotional period before its release. Pink Friday 2 is one of Nicki’s messiest eras, and it’s no better when her sex offender husband stays in trouble, whether it’s taunting Offset (which he was sentenced to house arrest) or being stuck in a court litigation against his 1994 rape victim. For a long time, the artist only returned to social media to talk about the album with the aim of releasing some promotional photos—which, by the way, were all very cool. However, little was said about the album’s content. It seemed more like a photographic project than a musical one, and the reason became clear after a while: the album in December was not yet finished. As much as it initially seemed like a very important work for the rapper, it began to give the impression that she was making light of the record.
This album is a walk in front of the dogs. And according to the status, it starts with the lowest point. “Are You Gone Already?” is one of the worst intros, perhaps ever. The announced Billie Eilish feature turns out to be a uniquely lazy sample of “When the Party’s Over.” It sounds like the YouTube rip of a video from a sad edit of a Billie Eilish song, and as if that wasn’t absurd enough, Nicki doesn’t find the touch of a pocket on the beat. Not only does it sound unstructured, but it also sounds like it has no focus, especially if it marks that it has finished this laughing stock from a track five days before the release of the album. What kind of album follows when you think that a half-baked freestyle with form-deep flow over a third of a historic dreck sample flip is what you should open for?
Improvement doesn’t really happen. The first half throws all sorts of things on the wall and hopes that something sticks. There is Houston trap on a very minimal “F**k the club up” sample, which Travis Scott has installed dozens of times better on Astroworld (“NO BYSTANDERS”); a little later, she samples Travis’ “Pornography” herself. “Barbie Dangerous” interpolates “Notorious Thugs” in Nicki’s worst case of Biggie Worship so far.
You can already notice: At the point where a creative vision should be, this album has samples. There are no creative, transformative samples but hits that are boringly re-ironed. There is nothing with sample spotting; the Whosampled archive for this album was completely registered 15 nanoseconds after release. For the oldies rotation, there are Gassenhauer-like “Heart of Glass” by Blondie, “Super Freak” by Rick James (that no one has come up with the point of sampling yet!), and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” And no, none of these samples do anything creative with the source material.
This is the mentioned uncertainty: As a veteran with an objective claim to the manual G.O.A.T. conversation, she should come back after five years between albums to set standards. Instead, Nicki timidly joins the second row of Wannabe-TikTok-Raps, directly behind artists such as Cardi B, Latto, or Coi Leray, i.e., rappers who should really be their “sons.” But instead of showing them how to rap horny, she pokes listlessly into their already not-so-good formula. Of course, this creative declaration of bankruptcy does not prevent them from sending weak diss to the competition. Latto is generically attacked, and Megan Thee Stallion gets a Tory Lanez line.
“Stay in your Tory lane, b*tch, I’m not Iggy.”
Otherwise, one should understand why this woman thinks she has to release an album of over an hour when she obviously doesn’t have enough ideas for a double single. The best song on this tape would probably be “Red Ruby Da Sleeze,” a slightly weaker iteration of “Chun-Li,” the one song on Queen that made you believe in better Nicki days. This is also the one song in which her actual talent can shine through a bit: The rap.
Where did the rapping Nicki get lost on this tape, please? If she has to be bitter and insecure, can’t she at least turn it into hard all-round envelopes? No, it seems more important to her, if not in samples, than to find musical shelter in features. Each guest’s contribution may also carry its sound into the house. It’s not like there’s anything to suppress. Drake comes by with a 2016 dancehall track that works solidly on “Needle,” but Nicki wouldn’t have needed a bit. Lil Uzi should please replicate “Just Wanna Rock” for a Jersey Club hit but fails on “Everybody” despite a catchy production. Nicki doesn’t fit on that. “Nicki Hendrix” imagines how Nicki sounds on a Future song. We know it because these songs have been around a few times.
“Super Freaky Girl” will probably remain the only thing on this tape that you should really call a hit. Basically, it was already the raising of the white flag back then. After Nicki had certainly already seen four or five singles go down, she gave up, played the TikTok formula, and benefited from it. It worked, but I can’t imagine that this song, against which “Anaconda” looks like a damn Picasso in terms of creativity, has anything to add to her heritage. She has never rapped with so little color and character. It is easily digestible for the ADHD age. And it is their biggest throw of this era.
I think most of the problems that make Pink Friday 2 one of Nicki’s worst albums come from its messy and rushed creation process. In many ways, it seems poorly made, as several moments seem to be poorly finished. These give the impression that, in a rush, the Trinidadian chose to release the songs without being completely ready, as in “Pink Birthday,” in which, although the instrumentation is refreshing, the mixing of the vocals in the chorus is extremely bad—it seems like it was missing a sound engineering job. There are also those that, although they sound finished, lack anything interesting. For the entire duration of “Bahm Bahm,” for example, she sings over a basic and uninteresting trap beat.
In relation to Nicki’s performance is still good; however, it does not sound as glossy as her previous albums. Minaj could use her rap to make songs electrifying so that, if another rapper performed her, she wouldn’t have the same captivating character. Something interesting about the album’s lyrics is how she opens up to talk about different personal topics, such as mourning her father, relationships, and hate received by internet users. There are several good moments when approaching these topics, especially in “Let Me Calm Down,” in which Nicki and J. Cole intriguingly explore the complexities of maintaining a romantic relationship between public figures. While the Trinidadian emcee exposes her need to have moments alone, Cole shows his experiences with infidelity in love, and he raps about how couples should act in emotional bonds in which it is easy to be undone by the public’s jealousy and hatred. The problem, however, is that some of the tracks have poorly elaborated compositions.
If she doesn’t fundamentally pull the helm, then Pink Friday 2 ends Nicki’s career. Queen was boring and formal but hyped for another five years and pretended to drop the very big album now to get out of the trap with this frightened, overlong, useless dreck of an album; she can’t iron it out again. I want to find out how much I am wrong, but as of now, Nicki herself hardly seems to know where her strengths actually lie. Pink Friday 2 is not only bad because the songs don’t work for the most part, but It’s bad because, as one of the helmspersons of the genre, she has finally revealed that there is not a drop of gasoline left in the tank. She has no ideas, she has no vision, and she is not hungry. This album is a creative shock rigidity, one of 2023’s worst.
Poor (★☆☆☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Let Me Calm Down”