Leave it to Nicki Minaj to have the final word on the this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, and in the New York Times no less.
At the end of August it was difficult to distinguish between whether MTV was doing its best to instigate rifts between Minaj and Taylor Swift and Minaj and Miley Cyrus or whether it was merely profiting from them.
Here’s the short version: Minaj expressed irritation on Twitter with a quantifiable double standard that leaves black women largely shut out of the prestige categories for award shows. Swift mistakenly thought Minaj was talking about her, inserted herself and later apologized when she realized she was wrong. Naturally, the two performed together at the VMAs.
When the Times asked Cyrus about Minaj’s points, Cyrus responded by saying that she couldn’t respect Minaj’s statement “because of the anger that came with it.” She also accused Minaj of being unkind and impolite.
At the VMAs, Minaj delivered the “what’s good” call-out heard round the world to a stunned Cyrus. “This b— that had a lot to say about me the other day in the press,” Minaj said.
In the days following, there were blind items and anonymously sourced pieces claiming that MTV had nothing to do with orchestrating the confrontation, and ones that claimed the opposite.
One tip, advanced by Blind Gossip, postulated that MTV producers wanted Minaj to call someone a b—-, either Swift or Cyrus, and when Swift wouldn’t agree to the bit, Cyrus became the fall girl.
It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure of gossip; you decide what sounds most plausible.
With more time to articulate her genuine feelings — or the closest thing to her genuine self she presents to the press — Minaj elaborated on her thoughts in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, published Wednesday. She offered her take on a wider conversation about cultural appropriation and identity, and explained why she found Cyrus so offensive.
“The fact that you feel upset about me speaking on something that affects black women makes me feel like you have some big balls,” Minaj said. “You’re in videos with black men, and you’re bringing out black women on your stages, but you don’t want to know how black women feel about something that’s so important? Come on, you can’t want the good without the bad. If you want to enjoy our culture and our lifestyle, bond with us, dance with us, have fun with us, twerk with us, rap with us, then you should also want to know what affects us, what is bothering us, what we feel is unfair to us. You shouldn’t not want to know that.”
Cyrus, for what it’s worth, has continued with the same shtick post-VMAs. When she hosted the debut of “Saturday Night Live,” her first sketch played on the very persona Minaj wants everyone to look at a little more critically. In the sketch, Cyrus played a suburban princess in a poodle skirt who reveals that she’s actually into black guys and sexually explicit lyrics.
We may never know the true circumstances behind that VMAs stunt, but we do know what Minaj thinks, and it’s pretty simple: Feel free to enjoy black culture, but take care to appreciate the people responsible for it, too.
