#TMPCHECKOUT: Nicki Minaj Covers DAZED talks about her 10 reign on the Music Industry
On newsstands now, Nicki Minaj fronts the cover of Dazed's latest issue,
ALL HAIL THE QUEEN, Nicki Minaj has had a glorious year from the EPIC 'No Frauds' release to her 'Swalla' Global Takeover to gracing every cover of the magazines this year to her massive makeup line with MAC selling out in hours. One would say this has been the best year ever for Miss Minaj who also became the only female in history of Billboard to have the most songs entered into the charts beating out Aretha Franklin's 40 year record.
"One can imagine Minaj’s difficulty in escaping her own bigness. Since 2007, she has become not just globally famous, but one of music’s most iconic presences. She has, by any available metric, surpassed every other female hip hop artist to become the most successful in history. Minaj will be as important to this decade as The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac were to the 90s. It’s likely her career will span many decades, like Madonna’s or Cher’s. She is the embodiment of millennial pink. The New York Times called her the most influential female rapper of all time. And, at the time of our chat, Billboard reports that emerging star Cardi B has landed the first top-ten solo female rap song (“Bodak Yellow”) since Minaj, underscoring the Queens rapper’s stature as the standard-bearer for female emcees.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Minaj’s first mixtape, Playtime Is Over. One by-product of this is that she has listened to her old music for the first time since she became a staple on the Forbes list. “It told me so much,” she reveals. “It taught me what drew people to me in the first place, and I needed to have that conversation with myself. Now, I have it figured out again.”
For Minaj, looking back at her first ten years in the business is like seeing from inside the eye of the storm: “If I had to describe (the past ten years) I would say ‘blessed’. Blessed and highly favoured, because the things that have happened to me have been once in a lifetime.”
