By Alex Lodge @alexlodgemusic
I could go on and on about racial stereotyping, drug references influencing children, overt sex references influencing children, the glorification of alcohol and guns, but I’m sure the outrage brigade will cover off all of these points soon enough. They don’t really bother me that much anyway as if they did I wouldn’t be able to listen to Mobb Deep ever again. What really bothers me about this heinous song / video combination is that it’s absolute dog shit on every conceivable level.
Obviously, the song draws its musical ideas from ‘Baby Got Back’ by Sir Mixalot. The main sample and the bassline come from this tune as well as a secondary sample that Minaj sings herself. To my mind, successful sampling takes an element of a track and transplants it into a new context, making us reappraise the music’s potential and changing the way we think about the original track. What this does is make me 100% sure that if I ever hear Baby Got Back again then I won’t be able to control the impulse to immediately electrocute myself in the ear canals. So, first negative, she’s ruined a good song by shitting all over the most recognisable part of it, like taking Usain Bolt’s heart and transplanting it into Jimmy Saville’s rotting corpse.
The second thing I hate about it is that the lyrics sound like they’ve been written by a child who doesn’t really understand the concepts of money, sex or reasonable forms of adult human interaction, but has been kept in solitary confinement for weeks with only pictures of shoes, expensive cars and a massive stack of weird porn. Here is a sample of the lyrics to illustrate my point: “Yeah, he love this fat ass, yeah, this one is for my bitches with a fat ass in the fucking club, I said where my fat ass bitches in the club? Fucking the skinny bitches, fuck the skinny bitches in the club, I wanna see all the fat ass bitches in the motherfucking club, fuck you if you skinny bitches WHAT?”
The aforementioned child also wrote and directed the video by the way, which seems to be simply a vehicle for Nicki Minaj to prove her main lyrical contention, which is that she has an absolutely gigantic batty and it makes loads of men want to have sex with her. While it is of impressive size, I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind, or in fact anyone that has even the vaguest inkling that music is supposed to mean something and be an expression of one person’s creative impulse, would want to listen to a song about it.
On a serious note, the most damaging thing about this song is its message; that the only things important for a woman are being sexually desirable and using this to have sex with men so they’ll buy you things. Unfortunately this message is now so ingrained in popular culture that nobody even needs to worry about writing proper lyrics anymore. As long as it can be sold properly the content becomes irrelevant, and mostly centres around misogynistic portrayals of scantily clad women competing over how much money they have or how nice their tits and arses are. Most urban pop music like this – The Black Eyed Peas and their various contemporaries for example – is a predictable, depressing and crushingly boring slurry of the most vacuous, puerile nonsense one can imagine. The saddest thing of all is that this is what sells. She’ll make millions out of this single. I hope she uses it to buy a massive space hopper that bounces her so hard her tits fall off.
If you still want to watch it, here is the video in all its “glory”