Nicki Minaj has received a lot of criticism within the hip-hop community because of her music sounding too pop. In a recent interview with Sway on Shade 45, Minaj talks about returning to her rap roots, her many layers as a person and her evolution. Read some excerpts below.
"I think I went from being a caricature in peoples' eyes to becoming someone with a lot of layers," she explained. "You just got to realize that I'm never going to be one dimensional, and even my core fans I think at one time thought I was one dimensional when I was doing the mixtapes. However, even on the mixtapes, I was singing and I was doing songs like…'Can Anybody Hear Me'...where I was singing and I was talking about being a female rapper and trying to get signed and what we go through…I was telling those stories on my mixtapes. I feel when the mainstream got a hold of Nicki Minaj, they turned her into a girl that wears wigs and has funny voices. Then we had to get past that, and I then had to reel it in and say, 'Actually, I'm a business woman.'"
Minaj continued to discuss the layers of her career,
"[The evolution of my career has] just been peeling back the layers and now, it's like the ultimate layer was me saying, 'Now I'm going to do whatever kind of music that I want to do'…[it's] not always going to entail a hard Hip Hop beat, but sometimes it is," she explained. "A lot of the tracks on [Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded] are a hard Hip Hop beat and just spitting, and that's why I've been [working with] some people like Cam, 2 Chainz and the legendary Nas. I got those people because…I wanted to get back to [just rapping]. I wanted to remember what it felt like when I just wanted to show people that I could rap."
