The Queen Returns

After a four-year hiatus, NICKI MINAJ is back with a banging album and a new outlook on life. But don’t worry, she’s not backing down.

- Devin Gordon

Nicki Minaj sits in a dim recording studio beneath a red fluorescent light that reads “nicki.” But this is not her studio. It’s a rental, a sprawling, Spanish-style compound in Burbank, located on one of those suburban L.A. streets that look so banal they must have a secret recording studio on them. There’s nothing unusual about an artist making herself at home during the long hours finishing up a new album. The sagging red couch is cozy and sleepable. You could take a nap in here, then develop some photos. But in order for a glowing, red fluorescent light that reads “nicki” to be on the wall, someone had to make it, then bring it here and install it. Someone had to ask for it. There had to be an invoice. A process was required.

So yes, Nicki Minaj is particular. That’s why she asked me to meet her here. Her new single, “Chun-Li,” as in the female Street Fighter character famed for breaking the street-fighter glass ceiling, is superlate, but something is still wrong, and that is unacceptable. She keeps hearing it, the wrong thing, and she can’t figure out how to fix it, and she’s already been in here for 24 (or 30? Or is it 36?) straight hours. And if you think that’s an exaggeration, if you think that’s just some hardest-working-rapper hyperbole, note her handlers’ vacant sighs when you ask them whether, come on, no BS—has it really been that long? Yes, it’s really been that long.