The one song Nicki Minaj wrote as a “joke”
It was a massive hit and something of a global phenomenon, but, from the perspective of its creator, it wasn’t a serious work at all. Nicki Minaj released her song ‘Anaconda’ in 2014, but, for all the success it brought her, she understood that it was little more than a joke.
“That whole song, I was just being dumb,” she admitted to Complex in 2014, several months after the track had been released as a single. “It was a joke.”
As she went on to explain, the track had come about as an attempt to keep her friends happy. “My biggest thing was seeing how my girlfriends Sherika and Thembi were going to react,” she said. “If they don’t like a song, they’ll be like, ‘No.’ As soon as they walked in the studio, we were laughing and having fun. I thought, if we’re doing this, then everybody is going to have fun with it.”
Despite the song’s loose, unserious origins, it proved to be a big hit for Minaj. It never actually reached number one in America, peaking at number two—but that, in and of itself, was progress for Minaj, as this was the highest position she’d reached in the charts up until that point. The song did really well in plenty of other countries, too, entering the top ten in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
But it was outside of the charts that the song’s true power as a pop culture phenomenon became evident. The music video was a smash, breaking the Vevo record for the most views in a single day following its upload. Within 24 hours it secured 19.6 million watches, and, in the years that followed, people never really stopped looking at it.
In 2021, the ‘Anaconda’ video became the first promo for a solo female rap artist’s song to ever reach a billion views. The count continues to tick upwards to this day.
The track’s jokey quality is apparent through its clear links to the Sir Mix-A-Lot song ‘Baby Got Back,’ first released in 1992. While ‘Baby Got Back’ was itself a cultural phenomenon following its release, reaching number one in the charts and making a star out of Sir Mix-A-Lot, it would be a stretch to describe it as a “serious” work. From the perspective of today, it bears the whiff of a novelty song.
Yet Minaj and her producers chose to sample it in ‘Anaconda,’ the name of which is also taken from ‘Baby Got Back’ and the line, “My anaconda don’t want none unless you’ve got buns, hun.” All of this certainly seems to back up Minaj’s claim that the song was always meant to be taken lightly.
But, despite its jokiness, Minaj claims that there is a serious message buried in there, too. “I wanted to create a song that embraced curvy women,” she said. “I wanted to be sexual but be playful with it. And I wanted it to be so melodic that even if you don’t understand English you could still go along with the melody and you would have no idea about all the raunchy shit I’m saying—I get a kick out of that. It was simple to write. I just created the melody and then I let the words happen.”