damn I caught pieces of that interview...didn’t hear that part tho lmao
DJ Envy Snaps over Nicki Minaj's Threat to DJ Self
- Thread starter keone
- Start date
damn I caught pieces of that interview...didn’t hear that part tho lmao
I just want to fuck
Last edited:
DJ Envy, Self or Safaree can't black ball anyone but I damn sure wish they could so what you said up there would happen
Radio station presidents, program directors and advertisers will have a say so on who will be blackballed.
If they tell him to place Nicki Minaj in the rotation of song play he has no choice but to do so or resign.
exactly, these flimsey ass djs have no pull.
Damn Larry Folks stay goin viral.
Well shit if he said that then it's no surprise because dude is the one that brought us Cardi B in the first place.
Nicki Minaj and Travis Scott Fumble Toward Yesterday’s Prize: A No. 1 Album
Image
Nicki Minaj is a classically skilled rapper who sees albums as a chance to show off her different guises.CreditCreditLeon Bennett/Getty Images
By Jon Caramanica
Moments earlier, Billboard reported that Travis Scott’s “Astroworld” was the No. 1 album in the United States for the second week running, relegating Ms. Minaj’s “Queen,” her fourth studio album, to No. 2 in its debut week.
“I spoke to him,” she tweeted, referring to Mr. Scott. “He knows he doesn’t have the #1 album this week. I love my fans for the #1 album in AMERICA!”
What incensed Ms. Minaj was a boost in sales Mr. Scott had received by bundling his album with merchandise and tour packages, and also an Instagram post by Mr. Scott’s paramour, Kylie Jenner, “telling ppl to come see her & Stormi,” Ms. Minaj tweeted. (Stormi is Mr. Scott and Ms. Jenner’s baby daughter.)
But that wasn’t it. For about an hour, Ms. Minaj — whose album sales were supported by similar packages — listed her gripes: Billboard chart chicanery, Spotify blackballing, record-label spinelessness. Her complaints about how those alleged actions affected the rollout (and subsequent chart position) of “Queen” — which she later brushed off as “sarcasm/dry humor” — were implicitly tied to Ms. Minaj’s broader belief that, as a female rapper, she has not fully gotten her due.
Nicki Minaj has canceled her fall North American tour. Read more here.]
No one is entitled to a No. 1 album, and in general, record labels and artists try to strategize release dates to maximize their chances. For the past two months, most people have stayed out of the way of Drake’s “Scorpion,” which had a five-week run at No. 1. Mr. Scott bumped him from the top a week ago. Presumably, Ms. Minaj expected to dethrone Mr. Scott (and next week, be dethroned herself by labelmate and collaborator Ariana Grande).
But it wasn’t to be. Still, the resulting pyrotechnics obscure a far bleaker truth, which is that this fleeting battle for album-chart supremacy — itself a metric that’s becoming increasingly irrelevant — is between two artists preoccupied with the album format who are not especially well-suited to it.
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For Ms. Minaj, a classically skilled rapper fired in the kiln of New York mixtape rap and one of the last true crossover hip-hop superstars, an album is an opportunity to show off, to wear different guises, to make a grand statement. It’s a declaration of pomp and range.
That’s what it is for Mr. Scott as well, but his approach is almost opposite. He is often less present on his own album than all of the guests he gathers. The sum total is impressive, almost overwhelming, but it says little about Mr. Scott on his own.
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“Queen” is Ms. Minaj’s first album in four years, a stretch of time in which the music business has been upended by streaming, and hip-hop has been upended by the internet. The 19-track record often feels like it’s fulfilling a checklist, trying to appeal to multiple constituencies in a way that was de rigueur, say, a decade ago.
“Bed,” a blithe soft-R&B collaboration with Ms. Grande; “Come See About Me,” a ballad that sounds like it were written for Faith Hill; and “Thought I Knew You,” a listless pairing with the Weeknd. There is “Majesty,” an overbearing collaboration with Eminem — to be fair, one of the only rappers who can match Ms. Minaj’s theatricality — that extends for an uncomfortably long period of time. And there’s “Nip Tuck” and “Hard White,” songs where Ms. Minaj’s vocals are buried under digital effects — an effort to keep up with the sounds of the moment that ends up distracting from her familiar commandeering presence.
[Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
As “Queen” makes clear, Ms. Minaj is a far better rapper than a singer, and a far better writer of rhymes than melodies. Her most muscular moments are her best here: the lightheartedly savage “LLC”; a pointed collaboration with Foxy Brown, “Coco Chanel”; and “Chun-Li,” full of casually ferocious bars, on which Ms. Minaj doesn’t break a sweat.
And of course, there’s “Barbie Dreams,” a buoyant remake of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Just Playing (Dreams),” a lewd rundown of his sexual fantasies about female R&B singers that verges on offense but was so skillfully executed it didn’t cross the line. The song is a crucial moment in 1990s New York rap, and Ms. Minaj does not take her inversion of the classic — which targets male rappers — lightly, delivering it with verve and also a fair bit of comedy.
That Ms. Minaj is so much more effective in this mode is only underscored by the songs in which she abandons it. “Queen” aspires to solve multiple problems at once, but winds up emphasizing a whole new one: the continuing fuzziness of her artistic identity.
Here again, she has something in common with Mr. Scott. He is hard to pin down on “Astroworld,” which may be the best of his studio albums but, like the ones before it, serves largely as testimony to his sense of scale and arrangement, and less as an affirmation of his technical skill.
“Stop Trying to be God” features vocals from James Blake, Kid Cudi and Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey, and harmonica from Stevie Wonder.
Mr. Scott is on there, too, but there is a cardboard blankness to his vocal texture. Even all the layers of processing it’s run through don’t enliven it. That is a constant throughout this album, which is both excitingly ambitious and curiously hollow at the core.
Mr. Scott has had some indelible singles over the years — “Pick Up the Phone,” “Butterfly Effect,” “Goosebumps” — but over the length of an album, he recedes. The 17-track “Astroworld” is as long as it is merely to show off all the guests he can attract. He also makes albums for an old-fashioned reason: to win prizes. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Mr. Scott’s A&R representative, Sickamore, described the glut of nontraditional guests on “Astroworld” as an arrow targeted right at the Grammys.
What Mr. Scott does have is a sense of hip-hop as a fully immersive performance. His live concerts are creative and enthusiastically rowdy. His aesthetic sense is highly refined. Unlike Ms. Minaj, for whom hip-hop is first and foremost about rapping, Mr. Scott understands hip-hop primarily as a lifestyle. (Some of that has to do with age — Ms. Minaj is 35, Mr. Scott is 26 — and generational shifts.) His album is an opportunity for music, yes, but also for merchandise that is whimsical and maximal, just like his shows. For Mr. Scott, the album is a pretense, a necessary step in between him and the exuberant presentation that is his true gift.
But albums aren’t for everyone. This tussle over Billboard chart dominance — never mind that Ms. Minaj is judging her first week against Mr. Scott’s second — feels especially futile given that it’s between artists who could probably continue to thrive without them. Ms. Minaj’s celebrity is secure. Mr. Scott has figured out how to embody modern hip-hop while bypassing the usual steppingstones. For both, the album is an albatross, not an answer.
Image
Nicki Minaj is a classically skilled rapper who sees albums as a chance to show off her different guises.CreditCreditLeon Bennett/Getty Images
By Jon Caramanica
- Aug. 20, 2018
Moments earlier, Billboard reported that Travis Scott’s “Astroworld” was the No. 1 album in the United States for the second week running, relegating Ms. Minaj’s “Queen,” her fourth studio album, to No. 2 in its debut week.
“I spoke to him,” she tweeted, referring to Mr. Scott. “He knows he doesn’t have the #1 album this week. I love my fans for the #1 album in AMERICA!”
What incensed Ms. Minaj was a boost in sales Mr. Scott had received by bundling his album with merchandise and tour packages, and also an Instagram post by Mr. Scott’s paramour, Kylie Jenner, “telling ppl to come see her & Stormi,” Ms. Minaj tweeted. (Stormi is Mr. Scott and Ms. Jenner’s baby daughter.)
But that wasn’t it. For about an hour, Ms. Minaj — whose album sales were supported by similar packages — listed her gripes: Billboard chart chicanery, Spotify blackballing, record-label spinelessness. Her complaints about how those alleged actions affected the rollout (and subsequent chart position) of “Queen” — which she later brushed off as “sarcasm/dry humor” — were implicitly tied to Ms. Minaj’s broader belief that, as a female rapper, she has not fully gotten her due.
Nicki Minaj has canceled her fall North American tour. Read more here.]
No one is entitled to a No. 1 album, and in general, record labels and artists try to strategize release dates to maximize their chances. For the past two months, most people have stayed out of the way of Drake’s “Scorpion,” which had a five-week run at No. 1. Mr. Scott bumped him from the top a week ago. Presumably, Ms. Minaj expected to dethrone Mr. Scott (and next week, be dethroned herself by labelmate and collaborator Ariana Grande).
But it wasn’t to be. Still, the resulting pyrotechnics obscure a far bleaker truth, which is that this fleeting battle for album-chart supremacy — itself a metric that’s becoming increasingly irrelevant — is between two artists preoccupied with the album format who are not especially well-suited to it.
You have 3 free articles remaining.
Subscribe to The Times
For Ms. Minaj, a classically skilled rapper fired in the kiln of New York mixtape rap and one of the last true crossover hip-hop superstars, an album is an opportunity to show off, to wear different guises, to make a grand statement. It’s a declaration of pomp and range.
That’s what it is for Mr. Scott as well, but his approach is almost opposite. He is often less present on his own album than all of the guests he gathers. The sum total is impressive, almost overwhelming, but it says little about Mr. Scott on his own.
War Without End
The Scientist Who Scrambled Darwin’s Tree of Life
A Rockefeller Heir, G.O.P. Lawmakers: How a Suspected Russian Agent Tried to Make Contacts
ADVERTISEMENT
“Queen” is Ms. Minaj’s first album in four years, a stretch of time in which the music business has been upended by streaming, and hip-hop has been upended by the internet. The 19-track record often feels like it’s fulfilling a checklist, trying to appeal to multiple constituencies in a way that was de rigueur, say, a decade ago.
“Bed,” a blithe soft-R&B collaboration with Ms. Grande; “Come See About Me,” a ballad that sounds like it were written for Faith Hill; and “Thought I Knew You,” a listless pairing with the Weeknd. There is “Majesty,” an overbearing collaboration with Eminem — to be fair, one of the only rappers who can match Ms. Minaj’s theatricality — that extends for an uncomfortably long period of time. And there’s “Nip Tuck” and “Hard White,” songs where Ms. Minaj’s vocals are buried under digital effects — an effort to keep up with the sounds of the moment that ends up distracting from her familiar commandeering presence.
[Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
As “Queen” makes clear, Ms. Minaj is a far better rapper than a singer, and a far better writer of rhymes than melodies. Her most muscular moments are her best here: the lightheartedly savage “LLC”; a pointed collaboration with Foxy Brown, “Coco Chanel”; and “Chun-Li,” full of casually ferocious bars, on which Ms. Minaj doesn’t break a sweat.
And of course, there’s “Barbie Dreams,” a buoyant remake of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Just Playing (Dreams),” a lewd rundown of his sexual fantasies about female R&B singers that verges on offense but was so skillfully executed it didn’t cross the line. The song is a crucial moment in 1990s New York rap, and Ms. Minaj does not take her inversion of the classic — which targets male rappers — lightly, delivering it with verve and also a fair bit of comedy.
That Ms. Minaj is so much more effective in this mode is only underscored by the songs in which she abandons it. “Queen” aspires to solve multiple problems at once, but winds up emphasizing a whole new one: the continuing fuzziness of her artistic identity.
Here again, she has something in common with Mr. Scott. He is hard to pin down on “Astroworld,” which may be the best of his studio albums but, like the ones before it, serves largely as testimony to his sense of scale and arrangement, and less as an affirmation of his technical skill.
“Stop Trying to be God” features vocals from James Blake, Kid Cudi and Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey, and harmonica from Stevie Wonder.
Mr. Scott is on there, too, but there is a cardboard blankness to his vocal texture. Even all the layers of processing it’s run through don’t enliven it. That is a constant throughout this album, which is both excitingly ambitious and curiously hollow at the core.
Mr. Scott has had some indelible singles over the years — “Pick Up the Phone,” “Butterfly Effect,” “Goosebumps” — but over the length of an album, he recedes. The 17-track “Astroworld” is as long as it is merely to show off all the guests he can attract. He also makes albums for an old-fashioned reason: to win prizes. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Mr. Scott’s A&R representative, Sickamore, described the glut of nontraditional guests on “Astroworld” as an arrow targeted right at the Grammys.
What Mr. Scott does have is a sense of hip-hop as a fully immersive performance. His live concerts are creative and enthusiastically rowdy. His aesthetic sense is highly refined. Unlike Ms. Minaj, for whom hip-hop is first and foremost about rapping, Mr. Scott understands hip-hop primarily as a lifestyle. (Some of that has to do with age — Ms. Minaj is 35, Mr. Scott is 26 — and generational shifts.) His album is an opportunity for music, yes, but also for merchandise that is whimsical and maximal, just like his shows. For Mr. Scott, the album is a pretense, a necessary step in between him and the exuberant presentation that is his true gift.
But albums aren’t for everyone. This tussle over Billboard chart dominance — never mind that Ms. Minaj is judging her first week against Mr. Scott’s second — feels especially futile given that it’s between artists who could probably continue to thrive without them. Ms. Minaj’s celebrity is secure. Mr. Scott has figured out how to embody modern hip-hop while bypassing the usual steppingstones. For both, the album is an albatross, not an answer.
A Chaotic Stretch for Nicki Minaj Is Capped by a Canceled Tour
Image
Nicki Minaj has canceled a planned North American tour with Future.CreditCreditCarlo Allegri/Reuters
By Joe Coscarelli
A Twitter rant on Sunday was followed on Tuesday by another diatribe on her Apple Beats 1 radio show, as Ms. Minaj took issue with music industry tactics that she, too, had employed, like bundling albums with merchandise and concert tickets to boost sales numbers. “He knows he doesn’t have the #1 album this week,” Ms. Minaj wrote of Mr. Scott on Twitter. Mr. Scott has not commented about his chart battle with Ms. Minaj.
The disappointing opening week for “Queen” came after the album’s early singles failed to gain traction, and its release date was pushed back from June to August. But the bumpy rollout, which included Ms. Minaj sending harsh messages to a writer critical of her work on Twitter, has not yet smoothed: On Tuesday night, the concert promoter Live Nation announced that Ms. Minaj’s co-headlining tour with Future this fall would be scrapped.
[Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
“Nicki Minaj has decided to re-evaluate elements of production on the NickiHndrxx Tour,” the company said in a statement. “Due to scheduling conflicts Future will not be on the North American run. Nicki Minaj will be announcing new North American dates to kick off in May 2019.”
QUEEN
✔@NICKIMINAJ
My darlings:
1:04 AM - Aug 22, 2018
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“This is all happening because I pushed my album back two months,” Ms. Minaj said in a video to her fans posted on social media. “I just finished writing and recording literally hours before the album came out. So now I just simply don’t have the time to rehearse and be on the road in time to give you guys the level of a show I need to give.” She added in another Twitter post that she also has “TV spots, videos shoots, + Made In America Festival coming up.”
“I really apologize,” Ms. Minaj said, “but it’ll be worth it.”
“Queen” sold 78,000 copies and was streamed 129 million times in its first week, for a sales equivalent total of 185,000 units, compared to a debut week of 244,000 for her previous release, “The Pinkprint,” in 2014. The new album “often feels like it’s fulfilling a checklist, trying to appeal to multiple constituencies in a way that was de rigueur, say, a decade ago,” the New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote.
Image
Nicki Minaj has canceled a planned North American tour with Future.CreditCreditCarlo Allegri/Reuters
By Joe Coscarelli
- Aug. 22, 2018
A Twitter rant on Sunday was followed on Tuesday by another diatribe on her Apple Beats 1 radio show, as Ms. Minaj took issue with music industry tactics that she, too, had employed, like bundling albums with merchandise and concert tickets to boost sales numbers. “He knows he doesn’t have the #1 album this week,” Ms. Minaj wrote of Mr. Scott on Twitter. Mr. Scott has not commented about his chart battle with Ms. Minaj.
The disappointing opening week for “Queen” came after the album’s early singles failed to gain traction, and its release date was pushed back from June to August. But the bumpy rollout, which included Ms. Minaj sending harsh messages to a writer critical of her work on Twitter, has not yet smoothed: On Tuesday night, the concert promoter Live Nation announced that Ms. Minaj’s co-headlining tour with Future this fall would be scrapped.
[Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
“Nicki Minaj has decided to re-evaluate elements of production on the NickiHndrxx Tour,” the company said in a statement. “Due to scheduling conflicts Future will not be on the North American run. Nicki Minaj will be announcing new North American dates to kick off in May 2019.”
QUEEN
✔@NICKIMINAJ
My darlings:
1:04 AM - Aug 22, 2018
Twitter Ads info and privacy
“This is all happening because I pushed my album back two months,” Ms. Minaj said in a video to her fans posted on social media. “I just finished writing and recording literally hours before the album came out. So now I just simply don’t have the time to rehearse and be on the road in time to give you guys the level of a show I need to give.” She added in another Twitter post that she also has “TV spots, videos shoots, + Made In America Festival coming up.”
“I really apologize,” Ms. Minaj said, “but it’ll be worth it.”
“Queen” sold 78,000 copies and was streamed 129 million times in its first week, for a sales equivalent total of 185,000 units, compared to a debut week of 244,000 for her previous release, “The Pinkprint,” in 2014. The new album “often feels like it’s fulfilling a checklist, trying to appeal to multiple constituencies in a way that was de rigueur, say, a decade ago,” the New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote.