Last March I changed the title of my blog to Philosophy of Contemporary Song, partly because I’d just read Dylan’s recent book, and partly because of a conversation with my sixteen year old daughter Grace, who told me she wished people like me would write about songs by artists like Nicki Minaj. She’s not at all a Minaj fan — she thought her lyrics were “trash” and was wondering why someone would write songs like that. I’m not a Minaj fan either, but I’m not a Minaj hater. I just haven’t listened much. She’s been on my radar without being the focus of any attention.
But now I have listened, and now I see why my daughter said what she said, and now, six months later, I think I’m ready to write about it.
Grace asked me to write about one particular Minaj song at the time. I don’t remember which one it was. I’ve asked her about three or four times, most recently tonight about five minutes ago, and her answer was, “OH MY GOD just pick one” in her nasally annoyed voice. It’s a deliberate choice on her part. She talks through her nose when you don’t deserve her vocal cords.
I will never ask that question again. I have, however, picked a song, and it’s “Super Freaky Girl.”
Ha. Yes. I see.
I’m from the 70s. I’m not shocked. What we need here is some historical perspective.
In 2004, Rolling Stone first released their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. I dutifully rounded up every song I could for my iPod (back in the glory days when you downloaded physical media onto your device) in numbered order from no. 1, Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” to no. 500, Boston’s “More than a Feeling.” It’s a wild ride. One year when I was driving to a conference I’d sorted them by year from earliest to newest and listened to the list again in chronological order.
What an instructive experience. 50s’ love songs involved a lot of crying, 60s’ love songs were generally very romantic, 80s’ love songs sounded like they were written by obsessed stalkers, and 90s’ love songs were quirky and romantic. My impression was that, thematically, most songs were love songs of some sort, and the word “love” is indeed the most common word found in all lyrics, appearing well over 1000 times.
But there’s the 70s — 70s’ love songs were crudely sexual.
I grew up in the 70s. As a teenage boy, I learned about romantic love from Aerosmith and Ted Nugent.
I am lucky I am not in jail.
A good example is Led Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song”:
Squeeze me baby, ’till the juice runs down my leg
Squeeze me baby, ’till the juice runs down my leg
The way you squeeze my lemon, I
I’m gonna fall right out of bed, bed, bed, bed, yeah
Similar lines appear in Zeppelin’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.” The whole thing is very moist and, I would say, moisture is the predominate trope guiding lyrics of this kind. These songs are defined by a poetics of personal moisture.
What’s most interesting to me is not that Zeppelin sang songs like these, but how unoriginal they are. Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, and Howlin’ Wolf (who eventually gets cowriting credit for “The Lemon Song”) are all much earlier sources for this phrase, taking us back to the 1920s at least. In the blues tradition, of course, this personal moisture is exclusively male, or at least begins exclusively male. Women start to talk back early on in this tradition too.
And sometimes they talk back differently. Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ‘Em Dry II” (the first version appeared in 1935), whose lyrics I can’t bring myself to reprint here, if you can imagine that after just what I’ve said so far, employs a poetics of personal dryness, if you can imagine that.
Go ahead. Imagine it.
That was 1935, and a woman singing, and Led Zeppelin doesn’t have anything on Lucille Bogan. Neither does Nicki Minaj.
And that leads right up to Nicki Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl,” which employs the poetics of personal moisture in these lines:
On applications I write “pressure” ’cause that’s what I apply (Brr)
P-P-P-Pressure applied, can’t f– a regular guy
Wetter than umbrellas and stickier than apple pie
I can lick it, I can ride it while you slippin’ and slidin’
The poetics of personal moisture here, significantly, aren’t just her own. They’re specifically in response to Rick James’s “Superfreak,” a song about a girl who is not the “kind you take home to mother,” a girl who is a superfreak appreciated exactly because of her deviant (freaky) sexuality. James’s song is sampled at the beginning and echoes of his music appear throughout Minaj’s song. So Minaj’s song intends to give James’s superfreak girl a voice: not just to talk back to Rick James, but to own the role of the superfreak, to make it her own, and to define it for herself. My daughter Grace’s friend Sarina (19) said that Minaj “Raps like a man,” explaining that “men rap about sex, money, and drugs, but when women rap about that, people get upset,” and she added that Minaj “raps just as good as any male rapper like Eminem.” The point to her was that Minaj was giving as good as she got, talking right back to the men talking to her.
I would like to talk about Minaj’s music as music, particularly after listening through The Pinkprint (2018) for the first time, but I don’t feel qualified. I will say I was surprised. It’s not just that it was good music, which I expected, or that it was highly musical, but it was creatively and originally musical far beyond what I was expecting, at least at times.
I could go on from this point with moral disapproval. Yes, it’s just about sex itself: sex without intimacy or attachment, sex for its own sake, sex as biology, as meat, as moisture. But I prefer to focus on understanding her instead, partly because moral judgments are too easy to make, and partly because that was Grace’s question: why? Women in these sexual relationships are usually either victims or objects of male desire and are defined in terms of male desire. Minaj, by inhabiting this role, by owning it, isn’t anyone’s victim. Her song turns a male choice into something more like a dance, like an interaction between equal partners, one where she’s giving as good as she’s getting, choosing and being chosen, but not just a princess in a tower. She’s exercising her own agency, choosing her own terms, and she’s celebrating them.
Laudable? I wouldn’t say that. There are other terms on which she could ground her equality and agency. But understandable?
Yes. I have to wonder, though, what giving as good as you’re getting would mean to her if she wasn’t dealing with strip club men on drugs.
James Rovira 
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