14 DAY TRIAL // Nicki Minaj may be labeled an exhibitionist but no matter the amount of flesh she bares on camera, she keeps many personal things close to the vest. One of those things is the painful experience she had as a teen, when she discovered she was pregnant.
She first hinted at it on the track “All Things Go,” included on her most recent album, “The Pinkprint,” rapping: “My child with Aaron would have been 16, any minute; So in some ways I feel like Caiah is the both of them; It's like he's Caiah's little angel, looking over him.”
Caiah is Nicki’s late brother, and Aaron must have been some former boyfriend. This was the first time Nicki spoke on the subject – and she confirms to Rolling Stone that, indeed, she had an abortion when she was younger.
The hardest thing ever
Nicki’s newest album is also her most personal so, come to think of it, it made sense for her to touch on such private and painful topics as an abortion on it. The rapper tells the music publication that she wanted to invite fans into her world, her real world, with this release, so she felt like she had no other option but to reference the abortion.
It was the single most painful and troubling experience of her teenage years, she says candidly. She never thought she’d recover from it and in a sense, she never has.
“I thought I was going to die. I was a teenager. It was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. [It] haunted me all my life. It’d be contradictory if I said I wasn’t pro-choice. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have anything to offer a child,” Nicki explains.
Today, she feels ready for motherhood, revealing in her most recent interviews that she plans on taking some time off very soon to start a family. She once jokingly said she’d be doing that when she had $500 million (€411.2 million) in the bank, from her music and related business endeavors, but since she’s a long way from being this rich, she would take that time-off sooner.
Nicki the feminist
Because her “Anaconda” video is one of the most talked about (and controversial) music releases of the year, Nicki also talks a bit about it in her Rolling Stone interview.
It’s not what you though it was, by the way: if you watched it and assumed it was nothing but an ode to the bubble butt, which is the most natural assumption to make about it, you were wrong. The video isn’t degrading to women, Nicki explains: it’s empowering.
Useless to point out, Nicki has come under serious fire from various groups online for her contribution to the objectification of the female body in the industry, when she could be a part of the solution. She believes we got it all wrong: her “Anaconda” video wasn’t degrading to women, it was meant to tell them to be proud of their bodies, especially if they happened to have a phat backside.
“Shake it! Who cares? That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be graduating from college,” Nicki adds.