DigitalFudge
JUB Addict
The critics are DRAGGING her to the PITS
Fact Magazine:
Quote:
“One, two, three, do the Nicki Minaj blink.” The defining characteristic of the Nicki Minaj experience is a scattershot sensory overload. When she hurls her entire bag of tricks at a track, she is capable of redefining “extra”. It’s not just her aim that can be maddeningly inconsistent, though, but her targets as well: her ascent to megastardom has been a story of flashes of ever-evolving genius, lowest-common-denominator laziness, second-guessing her audience, scoring hits by pure accident, radically subverting conventions, regressively adopting conventions, toning herself down, turning herself up – often all at once, and while simultaneously rattling through her repertoire of personae and accents too.
Her second album, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, opens with Minaj eyeing the bar she’s set for herself – and vaulting 500 miles over it. Within one song, she’s ricocheted between speaking in guttural tongues and outraged, elongated vibrato, sung a chorus with the demented glee of a Disney villainess, interpolated ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ for no reason at all and declared: “I am the ultimate svengali / Them bitches can’t even spell that.” She interrupts herself on the next track, briefly halting a beat as relentless as an industrial meat grinder to croon acappella: “Dick in your face. Put my dick in your face.”
Over the album’s opening six-track run, Minaj expresses her superiority from every angle, running rings around her foes with puckish playfulness (‘Beez In The Trap’), devil-possessed voices (‘Come On A Cone’) and sweeping imperiousness (‘Hov Lane’) over warped synths, explosive gun sounds and a ‘Grindin’-inspired beat made entirely from finger-clicks and a steadily dripping tap. Few rappers have as much command over as many vocal inflections, subtle as well as huge, as Minaj, who walks the tightrope between aural gif moments and straight-faced menace with aplomb. Endearing, too, is when she lets excited disbelief that her success is actually happening to her seep into her braggadocio. “When I’m sitting with Anna, I’m really sitting with Anna / Ain’t a metaphor, punchline – I’m really sitting with Anna!” she exclaims, referring to the New York Fashion Week snap of Minaj, clad in neon multicoloured bobbles and a platinum blonde beehive, in the front row beside a prim, poker-faced Anna Wintour.
It’s some of the most astonishing music you’ll hear this year; at several points, you may feel as though Minaj has turned your entire brain into exclamation marks. As is the way with peak Minaj, it’s so overwhelmingly dazzling that you might not notice at first how revolutionary it is: saving her toughest, most raw lines for Roman, her gay male alter ego, Minaj effectively fast-forwards past hip-hop’s endless phase of unreadiness regarding prime-time gay rappers by creating one with no fear but a whole lot of venom. In that crazed opener, ‘Roman Holiday’, he explicitly repels those who would try to alter or fail to accept him; later, he doesn’t just go toe to toe with Lil’ Wayne, Rick Ross and Cam’ron, but turns them into his *** stag sidekicks.
In the end, though, Roman Reloaded turns out to be more about Nicki than Roman – and specifically the vexed question of maintaining her commercial appeal. On her Pink Friday debut, Minaj ultimately seemed unsure of how to present herself, despite her multiplicity of voices; on the 22-track Roman Reloaded, she abandons any pretence of aiming for coherence and instead shamelessly caters to each demographic separately. The rap section is followed by an R&B section – the hazy majesty of ‘Champion’, on which she shouts out her recently killed cousin as well as a list of fallen female friends, is undeniably moving; a love duet with Chris Brown is undeniably repellent – which is followed by a horrifying run of pounding trance-pop produced by hacks like RedOne and Dr Luke. With the honourable exception of ‘Pound The Alarm’ – its avalanche-force hoover noises are so over-the-top and its hooks so catchy that you may as well save time and cave into it now – it’s hard to tell whether Minaj in dance mode is worse when she’s being witlessly execrable (‘Starships’), exhuming obscure classic guest verses to serve evil instead of good (‘Whip It’, formerly Cassie’s ‘Fuck U Silly’) or merely anonymous (the aptly-titled ‘Automatic’).
Despite this, Roman Reloaded feels more satisfying than Pink Friday by some distance: it’s not a classic album, but its contents implicitly argue that the concept of a “classic album” has become irrelevant in 2012 anyway. In an age when music fans of all persuasions cherrypick only the songs they choose for their iTunes libraries or Spotify playlists, making an EP’s worth of material for each of your fanbases while ignoring unimportant details such as whether they flow together seems eminently sensible: one wonders why more major label artists don’t take this route.
It seems appropriate, then, that Roman Reloaded‘s finest moment feels like an afterthought, a sop to Minaj’s Caribbean heritage tacked on as the penultimate track. ‘Super Bass’ producer Kane Beatz has a knack of using chintzy digital sounds that could be derived as much from J-pop as dancehall as the perfect frame for Minaj’s emotions; and on their duet ‘Gun Shots’, the moment when Minaj and Beenie Man finally come together for its final, surging chorus – makes the heart swell with pure feeling. At times like that, Minaj seems capable of anything; and if that entails her trying to do everything, it’s a price worth paying.
Score: 60/100
Los Angeles Time
Quote:
At her best, Nicki Minaj is, line for line, one of the wittiest, most creative rappers working today, either male or female. Her many personas and voices fly through her songs with joyful abandon, and she seems to be having so much fun astonishing us. On the first half of her second album, “Pink Friday ... Roman Reloaded,” the Trinidadian American rapper from New York City offers repeated evidence of her talents, and she delivers funny, biting, bawdy lines and rhyming couplets with apparent glee.
A supremely confident Minaj trades verses with otherwise cocky male rappers such as Lil Wayne, Drake, Nas and 2 Chainz and not only proves herself their equal but also pushes them to step up with their own ace verses. On the effervescent, minimally invasive bounce track “Beez in the Trap,” Minaj plays the queen of a hive, with Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz buzzing around her. Musically, the track bounces from ear to ear as though moving straight through your skull, and 2 Chainz's wild and slobbery verse is pretty great. Fellow New Yorker Nas continues his return to form on “Champion,” even if Minaj’s verses aren’t her best on the album.
But then, after the ridiculousness that is “Sex in the Lounge” (which sounds like a Lonely Island parody of an R. Kelly song, and, unsuprisingly, features Lil Wayne), the album drives off a cliff. In a spectacularly unfortunate crash-and-burn, Minaj abruptly hits the accelerator and stops rapping, leaving behind the minimal, bouncy hip-hop tracks that highlight her charm and achievement in favor of 128-beat-per-minute dance pop songs as simple as they are generic. It’s hard to witness, actually, an artist whose craft should be cresting, with enough power in the business to call her own aesthetic shots, chasing the money at the expense of the art.
That second half is a drag, filled with dance bangers of the blandest and most cookie-cutter variety. The music behind “Automatic” could be mistaken for a 15-year-old’s first stab at making a dance track on Ableton software, a cynically simple run with clumsy synth chord progressions that were already tired when invented at cheesy 1998 raves. These are accompanied by a few late-night ballads with singing so synthetically enhanced that it sounds like a Jetson robot.
The result is a disjointed, artistically confused release that’s not only way too long but also doesn’t really ring true as an “album” at all, at least if your definition is a collection of new songs with a central premise or statement that one listens to from start to finish.
This is only an album in the commercial sense -- a grab-bag of potential singles that may or may not hit, but that will be strategically worked over the next 18 months. Katy Perry’s organization perfected this business model on “Teenage Dream,” and Adele’s people are following it on “21” -- a gradual, patient release of singles over the course of a year or two, maximizing on the investment in what has become an iffy financial proposition.
It would be best if Minaj's "Roman Reloaded" fails as a commercial endeavor in the same way that its worst instincts fail artistically. Maybe then she'll stop trying to greedily be all things to all people and focus on what got her here in the first place: that ridiculous flow, wit, and imagination.
Score: 50/100
The Quietus
Quote:
Who needs stylistic, conceptual unity, when you have seven producers and Lil Wayne for a financier. In years to come, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded might be considered a key album, but only in the estimations of music historians using the sublimely multifarious Speakerboxx/The Love Below as a point of diversion for the full length LP, and the part that it unwittingly played in the demise of black 'human' pop music. Because, ever since Outkast re-imagined 'ghetto-fabulous' as a post human conceit, the bionically shape-shifting, janus-jamboree that resulted gave carte blanche to lesser producers. Mistaking virtouso diversity in the name of afrofuturist superhumanity, for unfocussed album construction, producers began dispensing with masterminding a cogent sonic manifesto for their artists - killing in pop both the album aesthetic and the auteurist statement. These days, the charts' super-royalty no longer make albums, so much as singles collections. All things to all people, at once everything and nothing, Nicki Minaj's second album is pop postmodernity in an advanced state of hollow, banal meaningless, and the first causality is Minaj herself.
With an increasing disconnect between artist and producer, the atomised modern-day event album renders the actual talent a secondary concern. A natural misfit, Minaj's individuality, her 'monstrousness', even, theoretically, her blackness, has been subordinated for the business of check-listing trending production tropes: the euphoric rave tracks (the house-pop 'Pound The Alarm'; the euro-trance 'Automatic'), the electro bangers ('Whip it', 'Starships'), the 'Umbrella' facsimile ('Marilyn Monroe') the beat-fortified ballad ('Right By My Side') and many other homogenised cliches. At a stretch you could argue that the gaudy Michael Bay-does rap production is designed to reflect Minaj's outsized persona; her machine-tooled superwoman take on braggadocio and mutant robo-sexuality dovetailing with the lurid, hyperreal blare of cutting edge ear-candy machines. But for the most part, 'mixtape-Minaj' has been erased from the sound. The only element differentiating this from Britney's recent album is the star's distinctive rap voice, which itself is frequently undercut by inanely chirpy productions or shoehorned in between sung choruses.
Obviously this isn't a new thing in pop - Diana Ross was a non-descript device on which disco's production titans imposed whatever they felt was necessary. But demoting the grotesquely fierce, provocatively oblique Minaj to the role of a human interface between audience and various technical specifications, is another degree of cynicism altogether. It's absurd that labels spend millions locating and developing an original pop personality, only to bleach that personality out on the album. Essentially this odd, 'female Weezy' exists now only in the barraging video-promos. These days, more exclusively that ever before since the birth of MTV, it's the videos that handle the image-making, while on record the artist is whatever the producer-for-hire wants her to be that day. The very same McProducers despised by the still unique MIA.
The first four tracks form a red herring of sorts, with the star getting a chance to bring a bit of herself to the tracks. Her personal style - essentially a a sexually risque distortion of the Missy Elliot - is ablaze, while a wave of weirdo-rap production squares up for the occasion. On 'Roman Holiday' she's allowed a trite, lip-service framing device to establish the album's loose concept/alter-ego (the titular 'Roman'). With the star in imperious-queen mode: she talks in an English accent, offers a verse of 'O Come All Ye Faithful' and raps like a hysterical Tudor spinster. It's what she does best, a rap-charged supercharging of GaGa's performance-art pop. Next comes the coldly spare 'I Am Your Leader': the Young Money sound filtered through Minaj's afro-alien aesthetic, as sci-fi modulations bunnle up over a single subsonic kickdrum. The similarly simmering 'Beez In The Trap' meanwhile, is as detached and leftfield as a mainstream pop album is able to be - piercing pops of MIDI ringing through the draughty malaise of cavernous space. Again it's the single kickdrum which anchors the almost weightless production. After which, all out dis-track 'HOV Lane' is Minaj almost completely untrammelled, her 'blink-stink' flow at full stretch. But by the time we get to closer and vintage Minaj cut 'Stank Hoe', so well established in your mind is the image of her cowing to the money-men, it sabotages the 'Lady Weezy''s attempts at 'empowerment female'.
Score: 40/100
Slant Magazine
Quote:
One of Nicki Minaj's many gimmicks is that she has multiple personalities, and if it wasn't true before she made the jump from mixtape scene-stealer to unlikely Top 40 staple, then it probably became true around the time she showed up on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to reenact a YouTube performance of "Super Bass" with two fans, aged five and eight. Personally, I like the idea of an America where it's considered boring when adorable British girls are flown in to hang out with lesbian talk show hosts and multiracial female rappers, but for Minaj that was indeed the moment where she seemed closest to the PG standards of mega-star innocuousness. That must've been confusing for a woman whose rap-radio single at the time was "Did It on 'Em," where she rides a nasty beat and talks about shitting on her competitors, who would perform at the Grammy Awards a few months later and piss off the Catholic League by staging an exorcism, proving, as though the mutually plagiaristic Madonna-Gaga organism hadn't, that humping any arbitrarily chosen piece of Catholic iconography is still the safest bet for scandal on demand, and then on American Idol shortly afterward, ready to make like Katy Perry for a crowd mostly comprised of tweens and their parents.
It's no wonder, then, that Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded starts with Minaj acting out a literal identity crisis on "Roman Holiday," reintroducing us to Roman Zolanski, her psychotic male alter ego. The whole idea of Roman being a separate character who occasionally fights his way into command of Minaj is one that's been realized inconsistently so far, and it's hard to tell if there's supposed to be a specific voice corresponding to Roman or if he's embodied more abstractly in the attitude of Minaj's tougher-sounding rap numbers. Either way, I think that Slant's own Jesse Cataldo nailed it in his review of Minaj's Pink Friday when he observed that the Roman persona never actually scans as one among a Sybil-like legion. Minaj is either exceling in her niche—which is dishing out vulgar, violent trash-talk with all the manic vocal contortions we've come to expect—or she's doing something far less interesting. That seemed less obviously true after "Super Bass" showed just how good Minaj could make bubblegum rap sound, but Roman Reloaded more than makes the case that "Super Bass" was a fluke and that Minaj's potential as a crossover artist is negligible.
The three tracks following "Roman Holiday" are "Roman" songs—i.e., hard, confrontational rap songs with guests like Cam'ron and Rick Ross. And they're brilliant. "Come on a Cone" has her rhyming over a snarling knot of synths that sounds like a swarm of bees, and includes breaks for Minaj to do her best approximation of a pop-diva vocal while she coos about putting her dick in your face. It's one of the most hilarious and genuinely unexpected moments I've heard from a rapper not named Missy Elliott. It's followed by "I Am Your Leader" and "Beez in the Trap," two excellent tracks which manage to sound both bubbly and heavy as Minaj delivers her most effortlessly entertaining shit-talk to date.
The remaining 53 minutes of Roman Reloaded are a disaster, so much so that I could fill the rest of this review with a non-exhaustive list of the most embarrassing missteps. The album is partitioned almost exactly between a rap half and a pop half; the former is unquestionably stronger, but after "Beez in the Trap," it limps off to its own disheartening conclusion. "Champion" finds Minaj, Drake, Nas, and Young Jeezy incapable of landing a solid verse between them, and "Sex in the Lounge," with Lil Wayne and Bobby V, is an R&B seduction so tepid that it verges on parody. After the first 59 seconds, Minaj vanishes altogether so that Bobby V can sing about treating a girl (presumably Minaj) to "sex in the lounge," which must be a close second to sex in the bedroom on the list of wholly ordinary places for lovemaking.
If Roman Reloaded ended there it would just be a disappointing album, but tacked on to this mediocre rap album is a ghastly and desperate bid for a hit single that sees Minaj and producer RedOne snatching items from a veritable sale rack of tired Top 40 tricks and tossing them hastily over the most basic synth and drum-machine presets. "Starships" and the three functionally interchangeable tracks that follow are retro-techno-pop earsores comprised of indiscriminately arranged bits of LMFAO's "I'm Sexy and I Know It," Rihanna's "We Found Love," and pretty much any recent Britney Spears or Katy Perry song you can name. Minaj isn't much of a singer, and not much of a lyricist either. For the chorus to her self-affirmation anthem, Minaj shouts "Starships were meant to fly!," echoing "Baby, you're a firework!" for its uncomprehending intuition that if something is in the sky then it must also be inspiring, while her repeated exhortation on "Pound the Alarm" to get things "hotter and hotter and sexy and hotter" is about as weak as club-jam come-ons get. On a Madonna-by-way-of-Gaga knock-off called "Beautiful Sinner," Minaj fumbles around making vapid sex-as-religion metaphors that are insightful about neither topic, though her ambitious choice of role models ensures that the song is better than "Marilyn Monroe," which sounds like it was written for Demi Lovato, or "Young Forever," which sounds, inexplicably, exactly like the Ready Set's mediocre hit "Love Like Woe."
Some of these songs just sound cheap and rushed in the way that major-label filler typically does, but "Beautiful Sinner" and "Marilyn Monroe," being such dimly apprehended approximations of the cultural references currently in vogue, suggest that the prospects for Minaj's pop career are already terminal. In their attempt to rush out a "Super Bass" follow-up, Minaj's producers have cynically wrung her for every dopey could-be-hit she's good for, determined to squeeze as much chart mileage as they can from a performer who brings nothing of value to the table where making chart-pop is concerned. Though you could call Roman Reloaded schizophrenic, the better word would be noncommittal. Most of the songs are just too generic and referential to read as an extension of anyone's ego, alter or otherwise. Minaj seems to think that when she writes and performs a pop song, she has to exclude the warped humor and aggression of her rapping, but how much more interesting would it be to hear her (as Roman, or whatever) tear through a catalogue of recent pop clichés with as much intention to mock as to imitate? When she isn't rapping, Minaj conveys no personality, not many, and her obsession with Barbie dolls and Disney princesses starts to look like a disappointingly accurate hunch about the extent of her own agency in the music industry.
Score 30/100
Fact Magazine:
Quote:
“One, two, three, do the Nicki Minaj blink.” The defining characteristic of the Nicki Minaj experience is a scattershot sensory overload. When she hurls her entire bag of tricks at a track, she is capable of redefining “extra”. It’s not just her aim that can be maddeningly inconsistent, though, but her targets as well: her ascent to megastardom has been a story of flashes of ever-evolving genius, lowest-common-denominator laziness, second-guessing her audience, scoring hits by pure accident, radically subverting conventions, regressively adopting conventions, toning herself down, turning herself up – often all at once, and while simultaneously rattling through her repertoire of personae and accents too.
Her second album, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, opens with Minaj eyeing the bar she’s set for herself – and vaulting 500 miles over it. Within one song, she’s ricocheted between speaking in guttural tongues and outraged, elongated vibrato, sung a chorus with the demented glee of a Disney villainess, interpolated ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ for no reason at all and declared: “I am the ultimate svengali / Them bitches can’t even spell that.” She interrupts herself on the next track, briefly halting a beat as relentless as an industrial meat grinder to croon acappella: “Dick in your face. Put my dick in your face.”
Over the album’s opening six-track run, Minaj expresses her superiority from every angle, running rings around her foes with puckish playfulness (‘Beez In The Trap’), devil-possessed voices (‘Come On A Cone’) and sweeping imperiousness (‘Hov Lane’) over warped synths, explosive gun sounds and a ‘Grindin’-inspired beat made entirely from finger-clicks and a steadily dripping tap. Few rappers have as much command over as many vocal inflections, subtle as well as huge, as Minaj, who walks the tightrope between aural gif moments and straight-faced menace with aplomb. Endearing, too, is when she lets excited disbelief that her success is actually happening to her seep into her braggadocio. “When I’m sitting with Anna, I’m really sitting with Anna / Ain’t a metaphor, punchline – I’m really sitting with Anna!” she exclaims, referring to the New York Fashion Week snap of Minaj, clad in neon multicoloured bobbles and a platinum blonde beehive, in the front row beside a prim, poker-faced Anna Wintour.
It’s some of the most astonishing music you’ll hear this year; at several points, you may feel as though Minaj has turned your entire brain into exclamation marks. As is the way with peak Minaj, it’s so overwhelmingly dazzling that you might not notice at first how revolutionary it is: saving her toughest, most raw lines for Roman, her gay male alter ego, Minaj effectively fast-forwards past hip-hop’s endless phase of unreadiness regarding prime-time gay rappers by creating one with no fear but a whole lot of venom. In that crazed opener, ‘Roman Holiday’, he explicitly repels those who would try to alter or fail to accept him; later, he doesn’t just go toe to toe with Lil’ Wayne, Rick Ross and Cam’ron, but turns them into his *** stag sidekicks.
In the end, though, Roman Reloaded turns out to be more about Nicki than Roman – and specifically the vexed question of maintaining her commercial appeal. On her Pink Friday debut, Minaj ultimately seemed unsure of how to present herself, despite her multiplicity of voices; on the 22-track Roman Reloaded, she abandons any pretence of aiming for coherence and instead shamelessly caters to each demographic separately. The rap section is followed by an R&B section – the hazy majesty of ‘Champion’, on which she shouts out her recently killed cousin as well as a list of fallen female friends, is undeniably moving; a love duet with Chris Brown is undeniably repellent – which is followed by a horrifying run of pounding trance-pop produced by hacks like RedOne and Dr Luke. With the honourable exception of ‘Pound The Alarm’ – its avalanche-force hoover noises are so over-the-top and its hooks so catchy that you may as well save time and cave into it now – it’s hard to tell whether Minaj in dance mode is worse when she’s being witlessly execrable (‘Starships’), exhuming obscure classic guest verses to serve evil instead of good (‘Whip It’, formerly Cassie’s ‘Fuck U Silly’) or merely anonymous (the aptly-titled ‘Automatic’).
Despite this, Roman Reloaded feels more satisfying than Pink Friday by some distance: it’s not a classic album, but its contents implicitly argue that the concept of a “classic album” has become irrelevant in 2012 anyway. In an age when music fans of all persuasions cherrypick only the songs they choose for their iTunes libraries or Spotify playlists, making an EP’s worth of material for each of your fanbases while ignoring unimportant details such as whether they flow together seems eminently sensible: one wonders why more major label artists don’t take this route.
It seems appropriate, then, that Roman Reloaded‘s finest moment feels like an afterthought, a sop to Minaj’s Caribbean heritage tacked on as the penultimate track. ‘Super Bass’ producer Kane Beatz has a knack of using chintzy digital sounds that could be derived as much from J-pop as dancehall as the perfect frame for Minaj’s emotions; and on their duet ‘Gun Shots’, the moment when Minaj and Beenie Man finally come together for its final, surging chorus – makes the heart swell with pure feeling. At times like that, Minaj seems capable of anything; and if that entails her trying to do everything, it’s a price worth paying.
Score: 60/100
Los Angeles Time
Quote:
At her best, Nicki Minaj is, line for line, one of the wittiest, most creative rappers working today, either male or female. Her many personas and voices fly through her songs with joyful abandon, and she seems to be having so much fun astonishing us. On the first half of her second album, “Pink Friday ... Roman Reloaded,” the Trinidadian American rapper from New York City offers repeated evidence of her talents, and she delivers funny, biting, bawdy lines and rhyming couplets with apparent glee.
A supremely confident Minaj trades verses with otherwise cocky male rappers such as Lil Wayne, Drake, Nas and 2 Chainz and not only proves herself their equal but also pushes them to step up with their own ace verses. On the effervescent, minimally invasive bounce track “Beez in the Trap,” Minaj plays the queen of a hive, with Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz buzzing around her. Musically, the track bounces from ear to ear as though moving straight through your skull, and 2 Chainz's wild and slobbery verse is pretty great. Fellow New Yorker Nas continues his return to form on “Champion,” even if Minaj’s verses aren’t her best on the album.
But then, after the ridiculousness that is “Sex in the Lounge” (which sounds like a Lonely Island parody of an R. Kelly song, and, unsuprisingly, features Lil Wayne), the album drives off a cliff. In a spectacularly unfortunate crash-and-burn, Minaj abruptly hits the accelerator and stops rapping, leaving behind the minimal, bouncy hip-hop tracks that highlight her charm and achievement in favor of 128-beat-per-minute dance pop songs as simple as they are generic. It’s hard to witness, actually, an artist whose craft should be cresting, with enough power in the business to call her own aesthetic shots, chasing the money at the expense of the art.
That second half is a drag, filled with dance bangers of the blandest and most cookie-cutter variety. The music behind “Automatic” could be mistaken for a 15-year-old’s first stab at making a dance track on Ableton software, a cynically simple run with clumsy synth chord progressions that were already tired when invented at cheesy 1998 raves. These are accompanied by a few late-night ballads with singing so synthetically enhanced that it sounds like a Jetson robot.
The result is a disjointed, artistically confused release that’s not only way too long but also doesn’t really ring true as an “album” at all, at least if your definition is a collection of new songs with a central premise or statement that one listens to from start to finish.
This is only an album in the commercial sense -- a grab-bag of potential singles that may or may not hit, but that will be strategically worked over the next 18 months. Katy Perry’s organization perfected this business model on “Teenage Dream,” and Adele’s people are following it on “21” -- a gradual, patient release of singles over the course of a year or two, maximizing on the investment in what has become an iffy financial proposition.
It would be best if Minaj's "Roman Reloaded" fails as a commercial endeavor in the same way that its worst instincts fail artistically. Maybe then she'll stop trying to greedily be all things to all people and focus on what got her here in the first place: that ridiculous flow, wit, and imagination.
Score: 50/100
The Quietus
Quote:
Who needs stylistic, conceptual unity, when you have seven producers and Lil Wayne for a financier. In years to come, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded might be considered a key album, but only in the estimations of music historians using the sublimely multifarious Speakerboxx/The Love Below as a point of diversion for the full length LP, and the part that it unwittingly played in the demise of black 'human' pop music. Because, ever since Outkast re-imagined 'ghetto-fabulous' as a post human conceit, the bionically shape-shifting, janus-jamboree that resulted gave carte blanche to lesser producers. Mistaking virtouso diversity in the name of afrofuturist superhumanity, for unfocussed album construction, producers began dispensing with masterminding a cogent sonic manifesto for their artists - killing in pop both the album aesthetic and the auteurist statement. These days, the charts' super-royalty no longer make albums, so much as singles collections. All things to all people, at once everything and nothing, Nicki Minaj's second album is pop postmodernity in an advanced state of hollow, banal meaningless, and the first causality is Minaj herself.
With an increasing disconnect between artist and producer, the atomised modern-day event album renders the actual talent a secondary concern. A natural misfit, Minaj's individuality, her 'monstrousness', even, theoretically, her blackness, has been subordinated for the business of check-listing trending production tropes: the euphoric rave tracks (the house-pop 'Pound The Alarm'; the euro-trance 'Automatic'), the electro bangers ('Whip it', 'Starships'), the 'Umbrella' facsimile ('Marilyn Monroe') the beat-fortified ballad ('Right By My Side') and many other homogenised cliches. At a stretch you could argue that the gaudy Michael Bay-does rap production is designed to reflect Minaj's outsized persona; her machine-tooled superwoman take on braggadocio and mutant robo-sexuality dovetailing with the lurid, hyperreal blare of cutting edge ear-candy machines. But for the most part, 'mixtape-Minaj' has been erased from the sound. The only element differentiating this from Britney's recent album is the star's distinctive rap voice, which itself is frequently undercut by inanely chirpy productions or shoehorned in between sung choruses.
Obviously this isn't a new thing in pop - Diana Ross was a non-descript device on which disco's production titans imposed whatever they felt was necessary. But demoting the grotesquely fierce, provocatively oblique Minaj to the role of a human interface between audience and various technical specifications, is another degree of cynicism altogether. It's absurd that labels spend millions locating and developing an original pop personality, only to bleach that personality out on the album. Essentially this odd, 'female Weezy' exists now only in the barraging video-promos. These days, more exclusively that ever before since the birth of MTV, it's the videos that handle the image-making, while on record the artist is whatever the producer-for-hire wants her to be that day. The very same McProducers despised by the still unique MIA.
The first four tracks form a red herring of sorts, with the star getting a chance to bring a bit of herself to the tracks. Her personal style - essentially a a sexually risque distortion of the Missy Elliot - is ablaze, while a wave of weirdo-rap production squares up for the occasion. On 'Roman Holiday' she's allowed a trite, lip-service framing device to establish the album's loose concept/alter-ego (the titular 'Roman'). With the star in imperious-queen mode: she talks in an English accent, offers a verse of 'O Come All Ye Faithful' and raps like a hysterical Tudor spinster. It's what she does best, a rap-charged supercharging of GaGa's performance-art pop. Next comes the coldly spare 'I Am Your Leader': the Young Money sound filtered through Minaj's afro-alien aesthetic, as sci-fi modulations bunnle up over a single subsonic kickdrum. The similarly simmering 'Beez In The Trap' meanwhile, is as detached and leftfield as a mainstream pop album is able to be - piercing pops of MIDI ringing through the draughty malaise of cavernous space. Again it's the single kickdrum which anchors the almost weightless production. After which, all out dis-track 'HOV Lane' is Minaj almost completely untrammelled, her 'blink-stink' flow at full stretch. But by the time we get to closer and vintage Minaj cut 'Stank Hoe', so well established in your mind is the image of her cowing to the money-men, it sabotages the 'Lady Weezy''s attempts at 'empowerment female'.
Score: 40/100
Slant Magazine
Quote:
One of Nicki Minaj's many gimmicks is that she has multiple personalities, and if it wasn't true before she made the jump from mixtape scene-stealer to unlikely Top 40 staple, then it probably became true around the time she showed up on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to reenact a YouTube performance of "Super Bass" with two fans, aged five and eight. Personally, I like the idea of an America where it's considered boring when adorable British girls are flown in to hang out with lesbian talk show hosts and multiracial female rappers, but for Minaj that was indeed the moment where she seemed closest to the PG standards of mega-star innocuousness. That must've been confusing for a woman whose rap-radio single at the time was "Did It on 'Em," where she rides a nasty beat and talks about shitting on her competitors, who would perform at the Grammy Awards a few months later and piss off the Catholic League by staging an exorcism, proving, as though the mutually plagiaristic Madonna-Gaga organism hadn't, that humping any arbitrarily chosen piece of Catholic iconography is still the safest bet for scandal on demand, and then on American Idol shortly afterward, ready to make like Katy Perry for a crowd mostly comprised of tweens and their parents.
It's no wonder, then, that Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded starts with Minaj acting out a literal identity crisis on "Roman Holiday," reintroducing us to Roman Zolanski, her psychotic male alter ego. The whole idea of Roman being a separate character who occasionally fights his way into command of Minaj is one that's been realized inconsistently so far, and it's hard to tell if there's supposed to be a specific voice corresponding to Roman or if he's embodied more abstractly in the attitude of Minaj's tougher-sounding rap numbers. Either way, I think that Slant's own Jesse Cataldo nailed it in his review of Minaj's Pink Friday when he observed that the Roman persona never actually scans as one among a Sybil-like legion. Minaj is either exceling in her niche—which is dishing out vulgar, violent trash-talk with all the manic vocal contortions we've come to expect—or she's doing something far less interesting. That seemed less obviously true after "Super Bass" showed just how good Minaj could make bubblegum rap sound, but Roman Reloaded more than makes the case that "Super Bass" was a fluke and that Minaj's potential as a crossover artist is negligible.
The three tracks following "Roman Holiday" are "Roman" songs—i.e., hard, confrontational rap songs with guests like Cam'ron and Rick Ross. And they're brilliant. "Come on a Cone" has her rhyming over a snarling knot of synths that sounds like a swarm of bees, and includes breaks for Minaj to do her best approximation of a pop-diva vocal while she coos about putting her dick in your face. It's one of the most hilarious and genuinely unexpected moments I've heard from a rapper not named Missy Elliott. It's followed by "I Am Your Leader" and "Beez in the Trap," two excellent tracks which manage to sound both bubbly and heavy as Minaj delivers her most effortlessly entertaining shit-talk to date.
The remaining 53 minutes of Roman Reloaded are a disaster, so much so that I could fill the rest of this review with a non-exhaustive list of the most embarrassing missteps. The album is partitioned almost exactly between a rap half and a pop half; the former is unquestionably stronger, but after "Beez in the Trap," it limps off to its own disheartening conclusion. "Champion" finds Minaj, Drake, Nas, and Young Jeezy incapable of landing a solid verse between them, and "Sex in the Lounge," with Lil Wayne and Bobby V, is an R&B seduction so tepid that it verges on parody. After the first 59 seconds, Minaj vanishes altogether so that Bobby V can sing about treating a girl (presumably Minaj) to "sex in the lounge," which must be a close second to sex in the bedroom on the list of wholly ordinary places for lovemaking.
If Roman Reloaded ended there it would just be a disappointing album, but tacked on to this mediocre rap album is a ghastly and desperate bid for a hit single that sees Minaj and producer RedOne snatching items from a veritable sale rack of tired Top 40 tricks and tossing them hastily over the most basic synth and drum-machine presets. "Starships" and the three functionally interchangeable tracks that follow are retro-techno-pop earsores comprised of indiscriminately arranged bits of LMFAO's "I'm Sexy and I Know It," Rihanna's "We Found Love," and pretty much any recent Britney Spears or Katy Perry song you can name. Minaj isn't much of a singer, and not much of a lyricist either. For the chorus to her self-affirmation anthem, Minaj shouts "Starships were meant to fly!," echoing "Baby, you're a firework!" for its uncomprehending intuition that if something is in the sky then it must also be inspiring, while her repeated exhortation on "Pound the Alarm" to get things "hotter and hotter and sexy and hotter" is about as weak as club-jam come-ons get. On a Madonna-by-way-of-Gaga knock-off called "Beautiful Sinner," Minaj fumbles around making vapid sex-as-religion metaphors that are insightful about neither topic, though her ambitious choice of role models ensures that the song is better than "Marilyn Monroe," which sounds like it was written for Demi Lovato, or "Young Forever," which sounds, inexplicably, exactly like the Ready Set's mediocre hit "Love Like Woe."
Some of these songs just sound cheap and rushed in the way that major-label filler typically does, but "Beautiful Sinner" and "Marilyn Monroe," being such dimly apprehended approximations of the cultural references currently in vogue, suggest that the prospects for Minaj's pop career are already terminal. In their attempt to rush out a "Super Bass" follow-up, Minaj's producers have cynically wrung her for every dopey could-be-hit she's good for, determined to squeeze as much chart mileage as they can from a performer who brings nothing of value to the table where making chart-pop is concerned. Though you could call Roman Reloaded schizophrenic, the better word would be noncommittal. Most of the songs are just too generic and referential to read as an extension of anyone's ego, alter or otherwise. Minaj seems to think that when she writes and performs a pop song, she has to exclude the warped humor and aggression of her rapping, but how much more interesting would it be to hear her (as Roman, or whatever) tear through a catalogue of recent pop clichés with as much intention to mock as to imitate? When she isn't rapping, Minaj conveys no personality, not many, and her obsession with Barbie dolls and Disney princesses starts to look like a disappointingly accurate hunch about the extent of her own agency in the music industry.
Score 30/100
