Meek Mill + Nicki Minaj Start Twitter Drama

Here we go again…

The internet blew up last night after rappers Meek Mill and Nicki Minaj (who not-so-coincidentally are dating and possibly engaged) took to twitter to voice their displeasure with the music industry and as usual, it’s just sounds like a bunch of whiney unimportant bull**** (otherwise known as the “look at me!” effect).

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING NEWS MAY DROP YOUR IQ, CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK

It all apparently started with the MTV Video Music Awards, in which Nicki Minaj was not nominated for best video of the year (Anaconda is actually nominated for Best Female Video and Best Hip Hop Video). Usually not being nominated for something as old and irrelevant as the VMA’s (does MTV have anything to do with music anymore?) is pretty easy to ignore but it seems that Nicki couldn’t help but feel “snubbed” by the exclusion of her videos from the “video of the year” category.

yes, seriously.

Let’s have a look real quick at the official nominations for “video of the year”: Beyoncé – 7/11, Ed Sheeran – Thinking Out Loud, Kendrick Lamar – Alright, Mark Robinson ft. Bruno Mars – Uptown Funk and Taylor Swift ft. Kendrick Lamar –  Bad Blood.

What do these videos all have in common? Well most noticeably, they all AREN’T EXPLICITLY ABOUT SEXUAL BEHAVIOR. Surprise! A public award show wants to try and keep things rated PG.

This fact obviously never crossed Nicki’s mind when she started tweeting her disapproval of the selections:

If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊😊

— NICKI MINAJ (@NICKIMINAJ) July 21, 2015

Now many have considered this to be an ad hominem attack against Taylor Swift, one of the two female nominees, but I think Nicki genuinely thought her video was worth nomination and in an half-baked attempt to get recognized, she tried to spin her video into a ‘body image’ issue (nice try Nicki, but your video is about how you do drugs, date gangsters and have a nice, big, ass– saying “fuck them skinny bitches” in your last verse doesn’t make you a champion of body issues). Surprisingly, Taylor Swift  actually responded: 

@NICKIMINAJ I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot.. — Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) July 21, 2015

It should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that Swift was addressing Minaj’s pointed attack on women, completely ignoring the fact that 3/5 nominated videos belonged to male artists… but that’s not how Nicki took it:

Huh? U must not be reading my tweets. Didn’t say a word about u. I love u just as much. But u should speak on this. @taylorswift13

— NICKI MINAJ (@NICKIMINAJ) July 21, 2015

Taylor Swifts remarks were completely misinterpreted by and completely lost on Nicki Minaj. Unable to see how she was perpetuating a negative stereotype about women and under perceived attack by America’s most powerful pop artist, Niki switched up her defense to one of race:

I’m not always confident. Just tired. Black women influence pop culture so much but are rarely rewarded for it. https://t.co/2xOvJzBXJX — NICKI MINAJ (@NICKIMINAJ) July 21, 2015

Unless you’re Beyoncé (but she has light skin so she isn’t really a black woman, right Nicki?). This is kind of a bold stance to take with respect to Anaconda and Feeling Myself, suggesting that she feels like a proxy for “black women who influence culture so much.” Yes, she’s a highly publicized, highly successful artist with an interesting story to tell. But does Nicki Minaj really influence pop culture? Did she make big asses popular? Did she really make the point that “beauty comes in many forms?” Or is Anaconda practically a contemporary remix of barmitzva favorite Baby Got Back?  All the videos and their lyrics are online, I’m sure you can figure it out yourselves.

It was as if Meek Mill and Nicki Minaj coordinated their  ****-stirring while lying in bed together because almost simultaneously, Meek Mill started tweeting disparaging things about Drake who was featured on Mill’s most recent single R.I.C.O.. Apparently Mill was “surprised” to learn that Drake had used a writer for his verse on the track and so Mill tweeted:

Stop comparing drake to me too…. He don’t write his own raps! That’s why he ain’t tweet my album because we found out! 😁

— Meek Mill (@MeekMill) July 22, 2015

Well, it’s hard to get more transparent than that… maybe Mill should hire a writer (or at least someone to stop him from tweeting, what happened to celebrity “minders?”) Obviously upset that he didn’t receive “twitter support” from Drake, he decided to go on a twitter rant “exposing” Drake as being an artist who uses writers– as if that isn’t common practice.

He ain’t even write that verse on my album and if I woulda knew I woulda took it off my album….. I don’t trick my fans! Lol

— Meek Mill (@MeekMill) July 22, 2015

Believe it or not folks, the artists you know and love only encompass the top-most superficial layer of the music industry, especially when it comes to contemporary pop and hip hop. Just about every function is outsourced to a broad network of professional lyric writers, composers, producers, recording engineers, mixing engineers, mastering engineers, publicists, A&R’s, etc. NOTHING gets put out into the mainstream without passing through a dozen hands first. The only artists who do everything themselves are the ones who have to because they have no label support (and they still pay others most of the time). This is not my opinion, it’s a fact. Drake is one the most popular rappers in the world right now… No shit he has writers on his team. The music industry is a big, hungry machine that needs to keep running… why would it wait for inspiration to strike when there’s money to be made? You really think Drake isn’t physically there when these writing sessions are taking place? Meek Mill knows how it works, he’s just acting like a bitch because he didn’t get a retweet.

So what do we really have here?

NOTHING. ****ING NOTHING. NO NEW MUSIC. NO LEAKED SEX TAPE. NO INJURIES (except feelings maybe).

Nicki and Meek Mill get their 15 minutes of “hip hop beef” fame thanks to the other big hungry machine… The Clickbait Machine aka The Blogosphere but can we even call this hip hop beef? This is more like hip hop Tofu– bland, boring, more popular than it should be and probably giving me cancer.

I would like to point out that NWA never won a god damned award. Not one.

So where’s all the Mad Rappers at? It’s like a jungle in this habitat But all you savage cats Know that I was strapped with gats While you were cuddling a Cabbage Patch

-Dr. Dre

**** awards,  art is not a competition. Real artists know that.

Meek Mill + Nicki Minaj Start Twitter Drama