New album review: Nicki Minaj fights for hip-hop supremacy

Nicki Minaj, "Queen" (Republic)

Uneasy lies the head that wears Minaj's crown.

That's the prime takeaway (whether or not she intended it to be) from "Queen," on which the most commercially successful female rapper in history spends so much time describing her dominance that a clear conclusion is that she fears it's beginning to erode.

And why wouldn't she?

Always a fast-moving genre, hip-hop has only sped up its evolutionary pace in the four years since Minaj's last album, "The Pinkprint." In 2014, few at rap's center were worried about competing with Post Malone; fewer still identified Cardi B as a legitimate threat.

"Took a little break, but I'm back to me," Minaj raps on her new album's "LLC," before taking what appears to be a shot at Cardi B, whose ascent as a woman with a microphone has been compared countless times to Minaj's: "Trying to make a new Nicki with a factory / They'll never toe to toe on a track with me."

But it's not just the names that have changed in hip-hop; so too have the routes to success. And on "Queen," Minaj, 35, continues to put her faith in the old way of doing things.

The fuddy-duddy stance — thou shalt rise from the streets and compose by hand with paper and pen — feels bitterly defensive, even when Minaj lives up to her boasts about her hard-won craft, which on "Queen" is almost all the time.

In the sly "Barbie Dreams," built on a funky guitar lick familiar from its appearance decades ago in a song by the Notorious B.I.G., she cleverly (and unprintably) flips the earlier track's conceit to make fun of Drake and 50 Cent, among others.

And she sounds as fierce as she has in years on "Coco Chanel," which closes the album with a spray of furious dancehall beats and a thoroughly imposing cameo from Foxy Brown.

What's strange about Minaj's preoccupation with these outmoded values is that it hasn't squelched — or been squelched by — her forward-looking instinct.

More than any other rapper at her level, she's at ease shifting between rap and pop; for her, it's never been a sacrifice of her credibility to sing airy melodies over sleek electronic grooves, as indeed she does here in "Nip Tuck," about a protracted breakup, and the disarmingly tender "Come See About Me," in which she pleads with an ex to reconsider their relationship.

On "Queen," though, all the back-in-my-day stuff suggests a lack of confidence in her unique perspective. Much of what endangers Minaj's supremacy she can't help. But some of it she can.

MIKAEL WOOD, Los Angeles Times

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