'Out' magazine caught up with Nicki Minaj for a cover story calling her a 'Curious Case' and really wanting to know if she has what it takes to change the game ! Check out the behind the scenes video, pics and excerpts from the interview !
"Three years ago, Minaj was an unknown from 50 Cent’s neighborhood trying to get noticed on MySpace. Her mom had filled her childhood home with music (“I knew the whole Diana Ross collection before I was 8,” she says), but her father introduced her to violence. On the 2008 track “Autobiography,” she raps about how her drug-addicted dad tried to burn down the family’s house with her mom still inside. Despite the turmoil -- or perhaps because of it -- young Nicki was passionately creative. She wrote her first rhyme before she turned 12 (“Cookie’s the name, chocolate chip is the flavor / Suck up my style like a cherry Life Saver”) and attended LaGuardia High School, the arts academy immortalized in Fame, where she studied drama and generated plenty of it."
“I was definitely one of those girls where you heard me before you saw me,” Minaj recalls, kicking off a pair of velvety platform heels in a tidy Los Angeles hotel suite and stretching out her calves, which are tightly wrapped in black leather leggings. She pondered careers as a bus driver or lawyer and worked a day job at Red Lobster saving up money for studio time. When she started to get serious about music, her then-manager recommended she change her name to Minaj (she was born Onika Maraj). Though she now admits she hated it, she obliged, tarting up her image for her first mix tape, 2007’s Playtime Is Over, which opens with a sex line call to 1-900-MS-MINAJ. After she skillfully remade the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Warning” for the DVD documentary The Come Up, she got a call from Lil Wayne. Over the course of two more mix tapes under his supervision, 2008’s Sucka Free and 2009’s Beam Me Up Scotty, she developed ferocious new identities, penned jaw-dropping explicit raps, and emerged as the first lady of Wayne’s Young Money crew. She also started to fend off pervy guys stalking her online by playing to her female fans. "
"As for her increasingly elaborate looks, Minaj insists, “No one would even have had the balls before to suggest things like my hair.” She appears in Ludacris’s “My Chick Bad” video with a pin stuck in her pink do, jet-black lipstick, and spikes on her shoulders. She sports a half-pink, half-blonde wig in the clip for Young Money’s “Roger That” because her stylist “hadn’t dyed one half of the wig yet, and I really wanted to wear it.” Though she didn’t realize it, these bold choices paired with her frank sex talk were making Minaj an underground gay heroine. She first learned of her gay male following when she spied fans’ spot-on renditions of her verses on the Web. She was blown away by the replications of her voices and mannerisms. “If a gay guy impersonates you, you are a bad bitch. Period,” she says, waving her bright-orange nails in the air. “There are no ifs, ands, or buts, because they only impersonate the best.”
