The Weekly Coos

After a remarkable start to her career, Nicki Minaj has taken a path that feels more and more catered to her fanbase than what has allowed her to prevail on the charts with dynamic singles like “Anaconda” and “Starships.” But as the “rollout” to Pink Friday 2 began with “Super Freaky Girl,” I had no anticipation about what could be. So, as I dug through all 22 songs, that level of anticipation felt merited as Nicki Minaj delivered one of her worst projects to date. “Super Freaky Girl” samples “Super Freak” by Rick James, though it does so unceremoniously and feels tacky as if there was little originality flowing in the juices of the think tank within the studio. It’s a recurring thing that continuously pushes the boundaries toward a level of corniness and unseriousness that boggles the album into a long and meandering journey that sometimes makes the better songs forgettable. It’s a disappointment in hindsight since Nicki Minaj is capable and does deliver quality verses, yet what surrounds them are just weak beats and samples that do little to entice the listener instead of having us question why she randomly sampled Cyndi Lauper—at least there is some good stuff to reflect on.

Pink Friday 2 opens on an intriguing note with “Are You Gone Already”—the production is whimsically quaint, at times angelic, with the way it stirs in the backing choir and effervescent strings that Nicki Minaj eventually downplays with off-putting melodic flows in her singing. It isn’t that it is jarring, but more so, it doesn’t have the right synergy that emulates from each side. It’s a sobering note that continuously shows us how seamless it is for Nicki to wear her heart on her sleeve despite that heart sometimes not being the purest. After this opening track, which doesn’t set a template for what is to come—unless you count the off-kilter samples—Nicki Minaj starts to deliver some fantastic verses as it progresses, rarely circumventing quality to appease her fan base, who will eat up much of what she gives even when, alongside her producers, they are butchering samples into these beats, and have little need to. But when it comes to butchering, I wouldn’t expect anything less from Nicki, who, amongst the public eye, has butchered her image (outside of the Barbz) by siding with, marrying, and propping up her sexual abuser of a husband, like as if people are supposed to be oblivious of how she conducts herself. 

I’ve never shied away from how I felt about Nicki Minaj, ethically and politically speaking; as it is with most of what we consume, talent is a deodorant, especially in sports—Nicki Minaj sometimes descends alongside it—it could be a reason why people barely batted an eye that she got a tentpole song for the Barbie movie, where it’s about propping up women, and yet Nicki has done little to do so in recent memory; however, I digress, as some of this befalls the music we get on Pink Friday 2, lacking a statement to make it easier to flush out the noise and get a grip at some of the great music that Nicki Minaj offers amongst the fray of weakness; there is some but not enough to wash out the bad. Much of the highlights come from Nicki Minaj flexing the possible carpel tunnel from writing some hard bars on songs like “Barbie Dangerous,” “FTC,” “Big Difference,” and “Bahm Bahm,” for example. These solo tracks have an exuberant amount of grit and elevated hunger that some of Nicki’s best qualities shine, like her twisting of multiple metaphors and crisp storytelling; unfortunately, she chooses to carry an imbalance between club and seriousness.

Though I’ve harped about the samples on Pink Friday 2, there is a reason it becomes more of a glaring issue for me besides the album’s bloatedness, which becomes more and more noticeable in the second half. Minaj and her producers incorporate a unique collection of samples that one can admire the ambition, even if the turnout flops harder than expected. One egregious example comes from the use of “Heart of Glass” in “My Life,” where the chorus gets reconfigured to deteriorate from the fluff of lost love the disco behemoth incorporated in the lyrics to bolster its kitschy and cheeky plaintive direction while Nicki furthers the self-absorption that I was left wondering how the two interconnected. It’s not the only time, and though I’m not someone to hate on samples on the regular, it’s just one thing to incorporate production notes into your own; when you bridge in the vocals, it loses you within two songs, and in hindsight might make you listen to the sampled song instead. It’s either meaning or its incorporation towards the overarching content Nicki Minaj is spewing, like using another love song, “Never Leave You (Uh Oh, Uh Oh)” by Lumidee on “Ruby Red Da Sleaze.”

Through the song “Ruby Red Da Sleaze,” Minaj is flexing and being braggadocio about her gang ties and more, but one of the songs she samples has percussion that doesn’t emulate such veracity. It’s less so bad in quality, just more so convoluted that it takes away from what songs could be as they become a distraction. Just as much as Nicki Minaj can be trying to implement too much into one, she has the occasional hit, and that consistency could have been up here if not for these offputting sounds. One moment it doesn’t is on the track “Everybody” with Lil Uzi Vert, where they use the Junior Senior hit “Move Your Feet” to emulate a simple but great Jersey Club banger. Beyond all this, Nicki does give us a lot to like, even if it feels more individualized, like how some verses slapped, whereas some beats weren’t enough to balance it out, like with “Cowgirls,” which comes with the sourness from seeing Dr. Luke as the producer, or “Pink Birthday,” where the beat is as pronounced and lacks enough pizazz to balance with the tone of the verses.

Pink Friday 2 is a wash, for lack of a better phrase. It has something within the crevices of its mess for a great song. Maybe it’s via the construction had with the physical releases, which contained ten songs to the streaming version’s 22. It is all over the place that it can be hard to get through it without cringing or wincing at the choices. But I can’t deny the quality of some songs, which then left me in the middle of the road, as expected from recent Nicki Minaj albums/projects. Why not give it a spin? I hope you’ll feel similarly between the good and bad.