14 DAY TRIAL // Nicki Minaj came under serious fire this summer from all sides, after the release of the video for her single “Anaconda.” A very vocal group of critics was formed by all the skinny women who took offense with the ending of the song, where Nicki rapped “[expletive] skinny [B-word]s” repeatedly.
At the time, despite the backlash on social media, Nicki refused to respond. She had shot the video and had seen it out, her job was done and she clearly had no intention of engaging those who didn’t like it.
Well, it might have been some time since the release, but the rapper is finally ready to address that controversy.
Skinny girls, back off, because Nicki is one of you!
Nicki has the album “The Pinkprint” coming out in stores next month and she’s also getting ready for the release of a new single. She’s doing interviews with trade publications to talk about the exciting stuff she has ready for fans, and obviously, the topic of “Anaconda” is bound to come up a lot in these.
To Billboard, for instance, Nicki says that she never meant to offend anyone with the video or the lyrics of the song. If anything, she was trying to empower women, be they skinny or curvy, or whatever body size they were.
“I consider myself a skinny girl,” she says. “Everything we see that's labeled as beautiful is very skinny. In the song, I kind of say, ‘[expletive] them skinny girls." But it's all love. I consider myself a skinny girl,” Nicki says.
“I went overboard with the video to show that I'm not going to hide. And those big-booty dancers I have, they're not going to hide. Black girls should feel sexy, powerful and important too,” she continues.
Shunning labels or just trying to pull a fast one?
By saying she considers herself a skinny girl (when she definitely isn’t, and not just because of her allegedly surgically enhanced posterior), Nicki is either trying to shun labels, or she’s hoping people’s attention span is so short that they don’t really remember the video / song in question.
If it’s the former, she’s being smart. The discourse that women should feel beautiful no matter their size or body shape has been employed before in the promotion of film and music, always with great success.
Nicki could be saying that all women are beautiful, no matter how society tries to label them according to their dress size. She could be illustrating that by saying she’s skinny, when anyone with a good pair of eyes can see she isn’t. She’s curvy.
If Nicki is hoping for the latter to happen, she’s about to have a surprise. When she raps that part at the end of “Anaconda,” there’s no denying she does it with spite: she’s basically telling skinny women are done because babes who “got back” have taken over. There is no misunderstanding her message, as presented in the song.
So if Nicki is wishing people forgot about that, they didn’t. She can’t go on the record on a new interview and talk as if the video didn’t happen, because it did, and moreover, it helped her get media attention for being curvy and proud – and “better,” as her lyrics implied, than skinny girls.
