Sequels may be huge enterprise, however they may also be difficult. Whereas they construct off already-existing reputations, they’ll additionally arrange grand expectations, comparisons between then and now are inevitable, and the patina of nostalgia can generally make the “then” appear superior to the “now” by default. Pink Friday 2, the fifth album from firebrand MC Nicki Minaj, makes an attempt to stability the expectations hooked up to naming itself after its groundbreaking 2010 predecessor with Minaj’s spirit of fixed reinvention and confrontational persona.
Virtually instantly after her debut got here out 13 years in the past, Minaj shot to hip-hop and pop’s highest echelons, and within the years since she’s been high of thoughts for listeners and tabloid readers. She’s additionally turn into a mom and misplaced a father or mother, and he or she’s opened up about her personal struggles in interviews and on social media, saying in her 2022 Video Vanguard Award acceptance speech on the 2022 Video Music Awards, “I want folks took psychological well being significantly, even for the individuals who we predict have excellent lives.”
Whereas Pink Friday opened with the glowing boast “I’m the Greatest” and closed with the Natasha Bedingfield-assisted victory lap “Final Probability,” its successor is framed in grief and stock-taking. Opening monitor “Are You Gone Already” is launched by a child’s cry earlier than sweeping into the angelic harmonizing of Billie Eilish’s 2018 reduce “when the get together’s over”; Minaj untangles the feelings she skilled after the 2021 loss of life of her father, Robert Maraj, which occurred simply days earlier than he was supposed to meet her infant son for the primary time. “Phone ring, he didn’t make it/I simply believed you’d awaken/A reminiscence within the makin’,” Minaj sings, the phrases tumbling from her mouth as if she’s reliving the second she came upon the information.
On the ultimate monitor, the woozy “Simply the Recollections,” Minaj flips the script, quoting Beenie Man’s defiant 1995 monitor “Recollections” as she braids recollections of individuals — well-known and never — who made an affect on her with shout-outs to her personal legacy as a groundbreaking MC who pushed via regardless of her personal vulnerabilities.
In between, Minaj — accompanied by a laundry checklist of A-list mates, together with her longtime friends Lil Wayne and Drake — reveals off her star energy and her still-nimble rhyming abilities (each as an MC and as a singer) over insistent riddims and top-tier samples. Danish duo Junior Senior’s slick indie-disco smash “Transfer Your Toes” will get chopped up sufficient that it’s made frantic on the Lil Uzi Vert-assisted gasconade “All people”; Lumidee’s genre-melding 2003 hit “By no means Depart You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)” is the spine for the idea-stuffed “Pink Ruby Da Sleeze.” Grief lingers right here, too: “Pink Friday Women” spins out of Minaj favourite Cyndi Lauper’s sequined rallying cry “Women Simply Need to Have Enjoyable,” and whereas its verses are a Pink Friday callback get together, Lauper’s candy reassurance that “Daddy pricey, you recognize you’re nonetheless primary” offers an air of melancholy to the recollections. “Let Me Calm Down,” a collaboration with the versatile J. Cole, is among the album’s standouts, digging into the sometimes-ugly particulars of relationships over quiet-storm synths and an insistent beat.
Pink Friday 2 is an extended album, and it’s going to get longer; Minaj has teased releases of 4 extra tracks this week, bringing its complete to 26. It’s acceptable given the data-dump nature of albums within the streaming period — extra songs equal extra streams equal extra gross sales, in spite of everything — however it’s additionally comprehensible given Minaj’s irrepressible persona and fixed shape-shifting that additionally manages to stay true to her brightly hued essence.
