Turn back now.
Ten years now since The Pinkprint dropped and changed the game! Thirteen years since Pink Friday equally changed the game! Difficult to believe right? Well, if you give Nicki Minaj’s latest release Pink Friday 2 a listen, then you will no longer have any challenge believing that we are now such a monumental degree of time and distance away from the attitude, production, and exceptional cast of guest artist’s Nicki’s earlier work was built on. That’s all gone now babyyyyy!
And who knows! Maybe we all deserve how far we have come from heaven’s light, but let’s take a moment to break down what it is we have been given for our crimes.
There is no feasible reason as to why this album is twenty tracks long, maybe other than that all other Nicki Minaj albums are twenty tracks long. Sincerely, there can’t actually be any reason other than the most cynical here, when once we get past FINNEAS mutilating his sister Ferb’s vocals on the opening track Are You Gone Already, we are given Barbie Dangerous and FTCU, and one thing becomes immediately apparent: No one who had a hand in this album remotely gave a shit. Nicki at her most phoned-in continues to still be a fine vocal honestly, but this can not hold its own when her producers simply just don’t care, gifting us beat after beat which you’ve likely heard ten thousand times before, across a spam of 808 bass samples findable in the top posts of r/drumkits since 2015.
The production as a general trend across the board in this album is embarrassingly lazy, and mired with obvious mistakes and oversights, with audible pops where the loops have not been properly cross-faded in and 808s flamming from accidental extra midi inputs in FTCU. If anything in that sentence sounded alien because you aren’t a maker of music, do not worry because you, yes even you, can watch a week of youtube tutorials and be more qualified to make this record.
If there was more evidence needed that no one cared about these tracks, one major smoking gun is in this album’s fade out issue. There’s been cases made as to the artistic value of a fadeout, a dying tool often maligned as a cop-out to not properly conclude a track, instead allowing for the momentum of a track to more naturally blend into the great silence. This is a take I’ve often been inclined to agree with, but this album makes that far harder to with the egregious over-reliance on the tool. On Last Time I Saw You, Beep Beep, and Forward From Trini, fadeouts are the cover for tracks finishing at points far too early, cheapening the whole project into sounding like a set of demos. Maybe one day soon someone will remember that they didn’t get around to finishing these?
The sample-use on this album is insane, and in a rare instance of grace, sometimes in a fairly good sense of the word. Everybody represents one of the few tracks which actually ticks the box as being a competent track (bar the again baffling fadeout nowhere near where the track should have actually ended). This track chops Move Your Feet by Junior Senior over a pumping kick, with Nicki finding her attitude again, bringing Lil Uzi Vert in for an energising feature. Here, though the sample is obvious and a clear reminder of its origins, the track gets to be its own thing. The same can not be said for a number of other tracks, such as Pink Friday Girls, where Nicki literally just takes the unaltered backing track for Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and riffs over it for a little bit until she gets bored, or perhaps the DJ on at the karaoke bar was done with her shit and started fading her off once more. Jarringly, this is then followed by the top-flying single of the project Super Freaky Girl, which when directly preceding a track doing essentially the exact same bit (this time we’re doing karaoke over Super Freak by Rick James), is made far duller than it was in isolation.
Let’s stop talking about karaoke bars, as that may muddy the very rich sense of space that Nicki’s mixing team have crafted for this magnum opus. No, rather the creative choice was made to leave Nicki’s vocals as dry and boxy as possible, leaving the grand impression that in each track she has been trapped in a slightly different-sized wardrobe than the last. It’s a bold move, leaving the impression on the listener of a horrible trip to the most haunted IKEA.
But Nicki isn’t the one who is trapped. Oh no. The plot-twist of this Swedish furniture-based A24 horror pitch is that you, are in fact the one who is trapped. In an album which simply refuses to end. To reiterate, 22 tracks, four of which qualify as probably ok to not be cut out.
We do at least end on a genuinely strong note with Just The Memories, a silky, slower cut, giving Nicki room to put across a solid sung hook and rap performance for the first time in what feels like centuries. A strong final effort, on an album which simply doesn’t deserve it. By this point, everyone in class has lingered in an eternity of second-hand embarrassment, wondering why you are taking so much time on your presentation of your crumbling papier-maché model when you so blatantly did it as a rush-job last night. There’s not even anything here worth laughing at.
This gets a 2 out of 10, though it feels like an act of pessimism to leave room with that rating for things to get worse.