“Perhaps Foxy Brown and Lil Kim’s sexually liberated hip-hop arrival in the mid-’90s had an unintended side effect, creating a cycle where we boost the most seductive women rappers like a push-up bra and then drop them like DMX on that Slingshot ride once they’re older and (ir)regular-looking and have run out of Blackberry phones to throw at people,” writes John Kennedy at Vibe in 2014, making his case that Kim ought to be respected for the elder statesman of rap that she is, the “Air Jordan of women rappers,” in his terms.9 I agree with Kennedy on all but the point that these consequences are ever unintended. The rift between the two never healed, and though Kim went on to more mainstream success than Foxy, with her 2000 album The Notorious K.I.M. shipping platinum in its first week, the feud followed her every move. Kim’s reputation as a jealous bitch was cemented in both hip-hop and mainstream media ahead of her reputation as a revolutionary emcee.
In 2009, an emerging rapper named Nicki Minaj began making waves for both her brazenly sexual rhymes and her affinity for over-the-top fashions that appeared to draw direct inspiration from Kim. “I did meet her when I was with Lil Wayne during the I AM Music tour. We chopped it up and I gave her props, but we haven’t spoken since. I got nothing but love for her, I think she is one of the key players in this female rap thing, so you can not do nothing but salute Kim,” Nicki told Necole Bitchie in 2009.10 But by the following year, the two were embroiled in a game of she-said/she-said, sparring on hip-hop radio, media, and on diss tracks. To read the media surrounding their feud, it is easy to imagine two vicious, petty women fighting over gossip and embarrassing themselves. But the actual documents tell a different story; both women are ferociously smart, endlessly patient in their interviews, and still relentlessly goaded into talking more shit than they seem to want to. In transcripts and recordings of Kim’s interviews about their relationship from the first few years of the feud, she acknowledges the feud but is quick to note how excited she was about Nicki when she was on her way up. Similarly, Nicki’s interviews regularly feature her candid admission that Kim is among her most prominent influences. The mainstream media, however, never got the memo about Kim.
“Nicki Minaj is the world’s biggest female hip-hop star, a top pop star and the first woman to achieve success in both genres,” reads a profile of Nicki by Vanessa Grigoriadis for the New York Times Magazine in 2015. This failure to mention Kim’s trailblazing crossover into pop stardom is just one of many glaring omissions in the piece. “‘Bitch,’ in music, used to be an insult, a sneer, and it still can be. But female empowerment is a trend, and the word has been reclaimed—by Minaj, in many a track; by Rihanna, in ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’; and triumphantly by Madonna, in her recent track ‘Bitch, I’m Madonna,’” she writes, somehow unaware of the track “Queen Bitch” that came out nearly twenty years before. Perhaps more egregious is the assertion that “early in her career, she also adopted Lady Gaga’s method of saturating the media with outrageous costumes,” as if Kim’s iconic pastel wigs and her showstopping MTV Video Music Awards skintight purple jumpsuit and uncovered breast adorned with matching pasty never happened. Nicki is annoyed at the question and dismisses it as “old.”11
During the interview, Nicki’s agitation reaches a breaking point when Grigoriadis asks a series of questions about the men in her life and career who are feuding with one another. It culminates in Grigoriadis asking Nicki if she “thrives on drama.” There is a record scratch of silence, which Nicki breaks by saying, “To put down a woman for something that men do, as if they’re children and I’m responsible, has nothing to do with you asking stupid questions, because you know that’s not just a stupid question. That’s a premeditated thing you just did.” Nicki says, “Do not speak to me like I’m stupid or beneath you in any way,” before asking Grigoriadis to leave.12
The interaction is an eerie echo of the annoyance Kim showed when being interviewed for the Guardian in 2013. Her interviewer said, “You seem like you’re in a positive place right now—so are your beefing days behind you?” Kim grows exasperated and replies, “That’s a premature judgment to make, because I’ve always been a positive person. People say things about me that they don’t understand. No disrespect to you, but you really have to look at what you said—‘You seem to be in a positive place now.’ You don’t know me. When have you ever seen me be negative?”13 Over and over again, Nicki and Kim are asked to go through the rituals of attending awards shows and going on the radio to discuss their art and are asked to discuss each other. These engagements do not unintentionally fuel these feuds; the fuel is their primary purpose.
“There can be only one,” the white-dominated mainstream media insist when it comes to female power players, and they double down on this assertion when it comes to black women. The refusal to let these two women, or any two women, coexist as representatives of boldness and brilliance in hip-hop has the more insidious effect of narrowing their cultural influence into hip-hop exclusively. Their inspiration travels much further than that. Christina Aguilera shed much of her pop image in 2002 with Stripped, the tour that saw her in provocative black one-pieces reminiscent of Kim’s and with a hip-hop sound and attitude not unlike Kim’s. Katy Perry spent years sporting well-manicured pastel hair that Kim brought to popularity. The raunchy stage shows of Miley Cyrus are homages to Kim’s envelope-pushing performances, and Cyrus even dressed up as Kim at the 1999 VMAs for Halloween in 2013. And I don’t care how many people believe she was the heir apparent to Madonna, Lady Gaga would never have wanted a ride on a “disco stick” if Kim hadn’t taken one years earlier on “Magic Stick.” Because she is more relevant to today’s music consumers than Kim, it is Nicki who is most able to publicly push back against the failure of white female artists and the media that pander to them to acknowledge the tremendous cultural influence of black women artists like Kim.