Come on Barbie, let’s go Barbie

I checked Twitter last night, to see if Tiger Woods' jumpoff count had reached the double digits (it had), and all people wanted to talk about was Nicki Minaj.

My former colleague Sickamore was on there congratulating himself for trying to sign Nicki Minaj to Atlantic, back when he worked there as an A&R. (Never let it be said that he doesn't have an eye for talent.) Her appearance on 106 & Park was the talk of Black People Twitter. And that video of some butch lesbian talking about how Remy Ma "ate the box" resurfaced. Supposedly, Nicki Minaj is said butch lesbian - though I'm not sure if that's true or not. I tried watching the video again to see if I can tell, and I think I'm starting to feel sick. I can barely eat. (Alright, I can eat.) It's gonna take hours and hours of watching the kind of pr0n I enjoy - the kind with particularly attractive women, natch - to wipe that visual from my psyche. It's a good thing I've got a lot of free time.

(Sidebar: Because I know some people were wondering the other day, Black People Twitter isn't a separate application, for black people, a la what MySpace is to Facebook these days. The name Black People Twitter refers to the phenomenon of black people discussing ignorant shit on Twitter at night, while working people sleep. The results of which are reflected in the Trending Topics the following morning. Examples of topics from Black People Twitter would include #uainthittinitright and #blackpeoplethoughts. For further reading, check these posts on The Awl and Mediaite.)

Does this mean Nicki Minaj is the next big thing? If black people who know how to use Twitter (as opposed to, say, Lil Boosie) can't stop talking her, who knows how popular she is in what you might call the rank and file black community - the people I live with here in a shanty town, as declared by Peter Rosenberg. And keep in mind, white people still use Twitter, too. We're still at least six months out from the point when some cracka-ass cracka invents a separate Twitter for white people. Or is that what Google Wave is supposed to be? Anyway, you'd have to think that Nicki Minaj has at least as much buzz as any number of guy rappers who somehow got major labels to release their albums recently. A certain African fellow from this nation's capital comes to mind... In fact, I'm convinced that the reason a Nicki Minaj album didn't hit stores a long time ago is because the TIs know no one will buy a rap album by a woman, regardless of how much of a sideshow she is otherwise.

The formula used to seem so simple: Find a black chick with a nice set of cans, get a real MC to write her rhymes, then bam, you had a successful female rapper. Lil Kim didn't even have a nice set of cans. It's only been fairly recently that she added some volume, which I wouldn't have recommended - not because I'm against that sort of thing (see: Jaymes, Jayden), but because some girls are beyond help in that regard, if they don't have enough tissue there to begin with. Instead, they should focus on other ways to meet a man's needs. If only Lil Kim was built like the woman who played her in the movie Notorious. To think, Lil Kim was upset with that casting decision. Meanwhile, that was the only thing that went right with that piece of shit.

Don't get me wrong, that part of the movie was fucking obnoxious and shouldn't even have been there. How in the fuck did the story of Biggie Smalls turn into a love triangle involving his baby's mother, his wife, and his jumpoff? Who gives a fuck about any of those bitches? If they were included in the film at all, it should have been as a subplot about how Biggie's romantic relationships were essentially a series of upgrades to ever more light skinted women. It could have even been extended to his relationship with his daughter. Would Biggie have spent more time with her, if she wasn't so dark? As much as it pains me to say this, Yes, obviously he would have. They could have brought in Lee Daniels to work on the script. If he was too expensive, I would have done it for free, for my own personal amusement. I would have talked to the producers about introducing yet another female character - a white woman Biggie would have gotten with, if only he weren't assassinated by Suge Knight. Which of course would have given the film an even more tragic connotation. You know Biggie had his crooked-ass eye on some white pussy. I wonder if he died without making the ultimate upgrade (in some people's view).

Confession Time: Not only did I own a copy of Lil Kim's Hard Core on CD, I probably still know like half the words to it. (It and that first Foxy Brown album, which sucks balls, are the only female rap albums I ever had. Because I'm a misogynist.) It's kind of a lost classic of mid '90s era rap music - except for the fact that it should be discounted, because Lil Kim isn't a real MC. I feel the same way about it that the people from Pitchfork, who should know better, must feel about Kanye West's oeuvre. Actually, it hadn't even occurred to me that Lil Kim probably never wrote a rhyme a day in her life, until years later, when audio surfaced of the reference tracks Biggie made for her. It's no wonder those songs are so good.

Nicki Minaj's songs, meanwhile? Yikes! That freestyle she did with Oj da Jewman and Wacka Flocka on BET might honestly be the absolute nadir of rap music. I could check the archives of Cocaine Blunts, but I can't imagine anything worse. Then there was that freestyle she kicked at the BET Awards. Why is she freestyling so much anyway? Is she trying to become the hoodrat Supernatural? There were complaints that her freestyle wasn't a freestyle per se, but rather a "written." She responded, to MTV, that a lot of the guy rappers there weren't really freestyling either, and while her verse was pre-written, she wrote it herself. Which wasn't even the issue, and which leads me to believe that someone else is writing her rhymes for her - probably Wacka Flocka, which would explain how bad they are. For her sake, let's hope this really is just a matter of her needing a better ghostwriter. If that doesn't work, I'm at a loss for why she should continue to pursue a career as a rapper. Shakur is a much more attractive woman (I'm sure Biggie would agree), and she's hardly any worse an MC.