Being the often random rocket that we are, we recently stumbled across this Vogue photo of Nicki Minaj turned completely blue. We immediately thought “Na’vi Nicki Minaj?” while others thought “Smurf Minaj?” and Jezebel thought “Miss Argentina from Beetlejuice?” (By far the most accurate comparison, we think.)
The name rattled around our rocket brain. Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj… where have we heard that name before?
Oh yeah, at the forefront of nerdy projects!
The Vogue photo brought to mind how Minaj recently nerded it up steampunk style in her recent video for “Turn Me On.” (A video that we feel nails the steampunk aesthetic far more authentically than Justin Bieber’s latest limply-thrown steampunk effort.)
Then we remembered Nicki’s cameo in this Lonely Island video creating “The Creep,” a new dance in honor of John Waters.
That’s not her only dip into nerdiness. She dressed as Freddy Krueger in Ludacris’ video “My Chick Bad” and she’s following up on her first record Pink Friday with a sophomore effort titled Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, which contains the single “Starships.”
So far, her references to nerd pop culture have the air of a genuine appreciation and fun as opposed to any sort of audience pandering. i.e. We can imagine she thought that steampunk aesthetic simply looked cool, so she made video center around that look. (And she certainly looks like she’s having fun in the Lonely Island video.)
Nicki Minaj is a big fun nerd and we love it. We look forward to her inevitable cameo in Community.
Stubby the Rocket is the mascot and voice of Tor.com and if this were three years ago it would have made a “inevitable cameo in Lost” joke instead. The times they are a’changin’.
Oh, Stubbster, you are just one big adamantium-coated pop culture sponge, aren’t you? (That probably defies the laws of physics . . . but there you go.) This post connects many things and explains nothing, which is most excellent. Long may you wave randomly!
PS: There were no random cameos on Lost. Even that Sunny guy was ultimately part of Jacob’s Design.
I had to look up who Nicki Minaj is. I had no idea who you were talking about.
Roger, that is a perfect summation of where this post originated from. I’m going to print that out and post it on our wall.
First, you almost sound like you think she conceptualized the video. I highly doubt that.
Second, how is this more, or less authentic than Justin Bieber? It most certainly does appear to be a video which was slapped together to exploit a current trend. It’s a David Guetta video, after-all.
Third, I find the idea of Nikki Minaj being a “nerd” of any sort to be suspect. From what I’ve seen of her in interviews, and judging from the image which she puts forth, She seems to be a lot more “into” buying really expensive clothes, and living it up like a pop-star. Although I wouldn’t be surprised to hear her say something like “I’m such a geek for ’80’s horror movies” or “I’m an Apple geek.”
While the Turn Me On video concept came from director Sanji Senaka (there is a fun making-of video where they discuss it in detail) I find your dismissal of Nicki having any nerd roots OR creative cred from pictures and a few snippets of interviews to be utterly ridiculous. (And it doesn’t take much googling to find interviews about her creative process — and her pre-“Pink Friday” song “Beam Me Up Scotty” (NSFW).)
I’ve picked up on her “nerdiness” a while back…that dress reminds me more of Dot from the first fully computer animed show, REBOOT! It looks a lot like the dress from the episode “Talent Night” where she sings the sultry song “(Your’re)Alpha Numeric”. To her little brother Enzo and an amazed Guardian Bob.
You can see the sequence here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTSS2JLkRig&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL7EF8709A8E638CF7