“I had a horrible attitude”: How Nicki Minaj was discovered
Nicki Minaj has always been able to find a way to make a headline. In her early career, it was for her music as she was setting the standard for female rappers. More recently, it’s typical to see her name plastered in the news for whatever insane antic or rant that she’s been involved in that given week.
Minaj, whose real name; Onika Marat-Petty, finishes on a pretty apt note, was born in Trinidad and Tobago but moved to Queens New York when she was five. She alleges that she went over to the country as an illegal immigrant and still isn’t a US citizen whilst on a TikTok live stream, saying “you would think that with the millions of dollars that I’ve paid in taxes to this country that I would have been given an honorary citizenship”.
The rapper didn’t have the easiest upbringing though. She admitted in a 2014 MTV documentary that her father was an alcoholic and addicted to crack cocaine. This led to his being quite abusive to her mother and eventually, he even burned down the family home.
Despite her tough beginnings, the Queens native saw massive success during her rocket-fueled ride to the top in the early 2010s. Her debut studio album, Pink Friday, peaked at number one on the Billboard 200 and sold an impressive 375,000 copies in its first week.
Nicki used this success to catapult herself into the mainstream and cemented herself there with the release of her third studio album, The Pinkprint, in 2014, which saw massive critical acclaim. This was it, there was no getting rid of Nicki Minaj now, for better or for worse.
In the years following the release of The Pinkprint, the New York native has arguably been better known for her controversies than her music.
The biggest controversy that Minaj was embroiled in revolved around her marriage. The ‘Starships’ singer wed Kenneth Petty in 2015 and was quickly lambasted for this decision. This is because the singer’s now husband has a previous conviction for rape.
In 2021 a fresh lawsuit was filed against Petty alleging him of sexual assault. The couple attempted to broker a deal with the alleged victim who in exchange for issuing a statement denying the sexual assault happened, would receive $20,000 and a video from the rapper wishing her daughter a happy birthday.
During the height of the Covid pandemic, she tweeted, “They want you to get vaccinated for the Met. If I get vaccinated it won’t be for the Met. It’ll be once I feel I’ve done enough research”. This was met with a lot of backlash considering that by the time the 2021 Met Gala had rolled around, the vaccine already had a proven track record of working.
Even recently, Minaj had to apologise and explain why she had attacked her long-time friend and photographer Alex ‘Griz’ Lucas. The rapper might be purposely holding onto controversy though, as it played a part in her discovery. After abandoning her dream to act, Nicki struggled to keep a job, telling Billboard in 2010 “I’d been fired like 15 times because I had a horrible attitude”.
She even went into detail about her sacking from Red Lobster; “I chased a customer out of the restaurant once so I could stick my middle finger up at her and demand that she give me my pen back.”
Either way, her non-commitment to keeping a job saw a young Onika create mixtapes and post them to her MySpace page. Fendi; the CEO of the Dirty Money Entertainment label fell upon her MySpace account one day and signed her almost immediately. He then co-signed her on his Come Up DVD series. Lil Wayne saw Minaj’s Come Up performance and was enamoured and in 2009 signed her to Young Money.
From there on it’s been success after success for Nicki, so the moral of the story is to always be yourself, I guess.