Today (Oct 20), GQ made its new Nicki Minaj espos readable in full on the Interwebs. The mag’s newest correspondent attempted to shadow Nicki during a busy run through New York’s Fashion week to talk shop about her Anaconda video, the magnitude of her power and influence and her toned down look. As you read, you’ll realize it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park to jump into into the mind of Nicki — while she has a million things to do. Oh, and, do not ask about her a$$.
“I always thought that by the time I put out a third album, I would want to come back to natural hair and natural makeup,” she told me. “I thought, I will shock the world again and just be more toned down. I thought that would be more shocking than to keep on doing exactly what they had already seen.”
Read what Nicki’s “Anaconda” video really stands for below…
Okay, the “Anaconda” cover art, then. It was almost an afterthought, she says, the product of a photo shoot on the day that the “Anaconda” video was shot. “I just said I’ll put it out, never thought in a billion years that people would be putting [other] people’s heads on it. It’s the craziest shit.” I tell her that online I’d seen it as a rocket, jet fuel and fire being released from her undercarriage. “What hasn’t it been?” she says. “They’ve made it everything.”
You heard it here first. “Anaconda” is about a snake, and also about a woman’s ex-boyfriends, and the video is just one big slumber party. You can release a record cover into the atmosphere that makes all who see it so shocked and discomforted that their only way to metabolize it is to turn it into the world’s fastest-spreading meme, to the point where her squatting form ends up on a polo shirt, right where the little crocodile usually goes. You can do all this, and still you can look someone in the eye and say that it’s not cynical in the least, that it’s not a comment on gender or sex or the culture or anything. Double shrug. These are not the droids you’re looking for.
I dont know what there is to really talk about, Nicki Minaj tells GQs Taffy Brodesser-Akner of her Anaconda video. Im being serious. I just see the video as being a normal video. Minaj, who refuses to address the female form and message behind her hit, says theres no hidden meaning, no layer beneath the song or video. I think the video is about what girls do. Girls love being with other girls, and when you go back to us being younger, we would have slumber parties and wed be dancing with our friends. Minaj continues, SheNickis character in the videois just talking about two guys that she dated in the past and what theyre good at and what they bought her and what they said to her. Its just cheeky, like a funny story. But, towards the end of the interview Minaj acknowledges that the video is also about power and control. Im chopping up the banana. Did you realize that? At first Im being sexual with the banana, and then its like, Ha-ha, no. When discussing how the Drake scene immediately follows the kitchen scene, she says, Yeah, that was important for us to show in the kitchen scene, because its always about the female taking back the power, and if you want to be flirty and funny thats fine, but always keeping the power and the control in everything.
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In the “Anaconda” video, she says. “At first I’m being sexual with the banana, and then it’s like, ‘Ha-ha, no.’ ” I ask if she’s referring to how the Drake scene immediately follows the kitchen scene. “Yeah, that was important for us to show in the kitchen scene, because it’s always about the female taking back the power, and if you want to be flirty and funny that’s fine, but always keeping the power and the control in everything.”
Maybe she had been messing with me all along.
Or maybe she was simply telling me that it is not her job to explain herself. I had been warned before the interview that I shouldn’t ask about her ass, that she finds it degrading, and I had chalked up her reticence to that.
Read the full story at GQ
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