GQ’s newest correspondent, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, chats with the cheeky genius (in between cat naps) about the Anaconda video, power, control, and giving people something to talk about.
“I don’t know what there is to really talk about,” Nicki Minaj tells GQ’s Taffy Brodesser-Akner of her Anaconda video. “I’m being serious. I just see the video as being a normal video.” Minaj, who refuses to address the female form and message behind her hit, says there’s no hidden meaning, no layer beneath the song or video. “I think the video is about what girls do. Girls love being with other girls, and when you go back to us being younger, we would have slumber parties and we’d be dancing with our friends.” Minaj continues, “She”—Nicki’s character in the video—“is just talking about two guys that she dated in the past and what they’re good at and what they bought her and what they said to her. It’s just cheeky, like a funny story.” But, towards the end of the interview Minaj acknowledges that the video is also about power and control. “I’m chopping up the banana. Did you realize that? At first I’m being sexual with the banana, and then it’s like, ‘Ha-ha, no.’ ” When discussing how the Drake scene immediately follows the kitchen scene, she says, “Yeah, that was important for us to show in the kitchen scene, because it’s always about the female taking back the power, and if you want to be flirty and funny that’s fine, but always keeping the power and the control in everything.”
Brodesser-Akner sat down with Minaj before her Fashion Rocks rehearsal at Barclays Center. For this performance, she incorporated male dancers. “I went in yesterday, finally saw the dance for the first time, and I saw the guys doing all this sexy stuff that I wasn’t a part of. And I said, ‘Hello, why aren’t they humping me on the stage?’ We’ve got to give them something to talk about again.”
Brodesser-Akner reports that Minaj no longer feels as if she needs to hide behind outrageousness. “I always thought that by the time I put out a third album, I would want to come back to natural hair and natural makeup. I thought, I will shock the world again and just be more toned down. I thought that would be more shocking than to keep on doing exactly what they had already seen.”
