Fashion: Nicki Minaj

Midway through her platinum-selling debut album, Pink Friday, Nicki Minaj makes an apt declaration: “In this very moment I’m king.” Since she released her first mixtape four years ago, the pint-size, oft-bewigged MC from Queens has used her triple threat of pinup curves, zany theatricality, and lyrical chops to redefine what it means to be a female rapper. On the mic, Minaj zips back and forth between double time and half speed, switching accents from patois to Queens to spoof-of-little-girl-innocence, all in the space of two lines. She has little if any female competition (you have to look to the heyday of Missy Elliott for an equivalent), and in collaborations with rap’s—indeed, music’s—biggest male stars, including Eminem, Drake, Jay-Z, and Kanye West, she more than holds her own. Last September, when she, Jay, and West performed West’s hit “Monster” at Yankee Stadium, the capacity crowd’s loudest roar was for a pink-bobbed Minaj, who prowled the stage in studded six-inch platforms, delivering fearsome, tongue-twisting verses (“First things first/ I’ll eat your brain”). At the time, she hadn’t even released her own album.

“I always wanted to play with the boys,” says the Trinidad-born rapper, who moved to the States at age five. “I didn’t want to be a pawn in their game or have a sidekick role. I wanted to be more of a lead character—a superhero.” So in the flurry of guest appearances that propelled her to fame last year, Minaj didn’t take the sexpot route; she put her own ironic, often demented—but still lusty—twist on collaborations with everyone from Mariah Carey to Lil’ Wayne (whose tour she opened for this spring). When Ludacris enthused about a conquest’s outrageous bedroom skills in “My Chick Bad,” Minaj “chose to do punch lines and be comical, to show how bad I am lyrically, as opposed to how sexy I think I am,” she says. On Pink Friday, Minaj displays unexpected moments of vulnerability (“Trying to forgive you for abandoning me/ Praying but I think I’m still an angel away”) as well as some surprisingly credible singing alongside the virtuosic, take-no-prisoners battle raps for which she’s known.

Early on, Minaj rapped about wearing Ed Hardy (“I lived and shopped in Jamaica, Queens,” she says). These days she attends the Grammys in hair-to-toe custom Givenchy cheetah print. “I tend to like booties…[pause]”—she takes a beat to clarify: no sexual meaning implied—“and really flashy shoes: totally studded out, in five colors with an insane platform.” This knack for fashion exhibitionism often earns her comparisons to Lil’ Kim, but Minaj is more like Busta Rhymes in Gaga packaging: Unlike Kim, her style choices, and even her more sexual lyrics, seem based on her own desires, and her eccentric image masks a steely seriousness. She says she’s “fighting for the girls who never thought they could win.” But it seems victory may already be hers.