Nicki Minaj would like you to know she's not mad online and in fact she's laughing, if anything. The Trinidad-born MC, famous for giga-hits like Anaconda and Super Bass, also maintains the sort of feisty, vituperative Twitter presence that suggests she has more control over her social media than her management would like.
This week might have tested their patience to the hilt as she spent considerable time proving she was totally okay with, and not at all mad about, her new album being outsold to the tune of 20,000 copies by Travis Scott's Astroworld.
Obviously, she saluted his achievement with the decorum of any gracious silver medallist. “I spoke to him,” she purred. “He knows he doesn’t have the #1 album this week.”
As well as writing more than a dozen highly detailed posts about how her album, Queen, was the "real #1" and "broke the record for being #1 in 86 countries", Minaj also took to the radio show she has on an online music streaming service to decry the real culprits: online music streaming services.
“Spotify put Drake’s face on every playlist,” she said, “but told me they’d have to teach me a lesson for playing my music 10 mins early on #QueenRadio.” Here she was referring to having played two tracks from her new album before they were made available on Spotify, inadvertently giving Apple users a boost over their Spotify counterparts.
Hypocritical attack
All of this was merely a side salad to the juicy, grain-fed slab of beef at the centre of this controversy, that between her; Travis Scott; his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner; and their six-month-old baby, Stormi.
Minaj attacked the rapper and his super-famous partner for using dubious sales tactics; Scott for bundling copies of his album with merchandise, clothing and tickets for his later tour, and Jenner for promoting said tour to her 113 million followers with the words “me and storm ready”.
On the other hand, it would seem fairly ordinary for someone to promote their partner's work, as Minaj did for her then-partner Meek Mills. And Minaj has also used bundling extensively, even for Queen, copies of which have been included with tickets for a tour she had scheduled for this summer, with rapper Future.
Perhaps the final act of this popularity contest is the news that this tour has now been cancelled, after selling less than half the tickets forecast. But even this didn’t phase Queen Nicki, since the entire evening she had spent posting statistics was obviously just for a laugh.
“People are calling me thinking I’m huffing & puffing” she tweeted, laughing at the whole thing because who cares, right?
“This is sarcasm/dry humor,” she wrote, before adding a final word we might all agree on: “Yikes.”
