Due to its The Pinkprinttitle, Nicki Minaj’s upcoming album has already warranted possible comparisons to Jay Z’s 2001 album The Blueprint, but according to the Queens, New York rapper, her album has very few if any similarities to Jay’s sixth studio album.
During her cover story with Complex magazine, Minaj was asked if she feels there are any similarities between herself and Jay Z around the release of The Blueprint. She revealed that she can’t answer such a question since she didn’t know what mind state Jay Z was in prior to the release of The Blueprint, and added that naming her album The Pinkprint isn’t “that literal.”
“I can’t. I have no idea what he was doing before The Blueprint dropped,” Nicki Minaj said. “It’s not that literal. People keep asking me about Jay’s The Blueprint and they think I’m doing something like that. I made reference to The Blueprint because Jay is the biggest rapper of our time. The name of the album was inspired by Jay but not the body of work. I do think that it’s going to create new rules, though, in [the way] that [The Blueprint did].”
The Young Money rapper also touched on her “Anaconda” single during her Complex interview. She says the goal of the song was to embrace curvy women in a “sexual,” but “playful” manner. Minaj also added that she was “being dumb” throughout the song and says that it “was a joke.”
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“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. I started laughing when I said, ‘Boy toy named Troy.’ That whole song, I was just being dumb. It was a joke. My biggest thing was seeing how my girlfriends Sherika and Thembi were going to react. 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.”
Prior to the release of “Anaconda,” the cover art for the record garnered a great deal of attention due to a back shot of Nicki Minaj. According to the rapper, the cover art wasn’t premeditated. She also added that she earned enough respect as an emcee to be comfortable taking sexy pictures again.
“The artwork was not premeditated,” Minaj said. “I was shooting the ‘Anaconda’ video and I had my photographer there taking pictures. When I was about to shoot my next scene, I asked to see the pictures he’d taken. He went through five or six and that one came up, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. Yo, that picture is crazy!’ What made me excited about it was that people hadn’t seen me do a picture like that in years. The reason why I stopped taking pictures like that was because I needed to prove myself. I needed for people to take me seriously. I needed for people to respect my craft. I’ve proven that I’m an MC. I’m a writer; I’m the real deal, so if I want to take sexy pictures, I can. I’m at the level in my career and in my life now where I can do whatever the hell I want to.”
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