Nicki Minaj Hands DJ His Ass, Calmly Talks the Chip on Her Shoulder
[There was a video here]
Nicki Minaj and Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg. Together. At last. If this means nothing to you, fair enough: the story has been over for almost a year. Last June the morning-show host rather rudely dissed Minaj's pop tendencies at Summer Jam just hours before she was supposed to perform at the Hot 97-sponsored festival. She ended up pulling out of the show and discussing the whole thing with Hot 97's Funkmaster Flex.
Summer Jam is coming up next weekend, so in a bit of genius promotion, Rosenberg had her on his Morning Show to discuss their beef. Many excellent things went down over the span of their conversation. In fact, that Minaj would face down a naysayer in this public context is uncommonly bold in the first place. However, the two moments in the clip above are my favorites. In them:
1. Minaj looks Rosenberg right in the face and tells him what she thinks of him: "To me, I just don’t know your resume. I never found you funny. I never found you entertaining. I never found you smart."
2. Minaj discusses her reputation as a diva and explains why she can come off as so damn unpleasant: "If I was not like this, so many people would have taken advantage of me...There’s a chip on your shoulder because you’ve experienced headstrong men…and I experienced my mom not really speaking up as much as I wanted her to when I was young…I remember just thinking like, 'Why won’t she say something? Why won’t she yell back?'"
Minaj has discussed this latter issue before, but rarely this reasonably. Granted, she is still an egomaniacal monster (she is a celebrity, hello) and her path to her own personal positivity seems to generally involve negativity directed at others. ("I walked out of an interview because I was feeling positive and happy and this lady wanted to bring up this controversy and I didn’t want to deal with negative anymore. I just don’t want to deal with it," she explained to Rosenberg.) But the openness in this interview expressed by both parties (much to his credit, Rosenberg doesn't back down from his "Starships" disdain) is a rarity in celebrity journalism, and it's really great to hear two people who love hip-hop like it's a human talk about it at such length.