Because Rosie Perez Was Never All That Cute Above The Neck

How can you not love Nicki Minaj? There's that line in Pulp Fiction about "personality going a long way", and that's always been especially true about rappers. To be real, Kim was never that nice and her best material (Hard Core) just sounds like the majority of it was ghostwritten or directed by Biggie, and all the Michael Jackson drama that came later was just a bad look. Foxy was the same way, except her albums and rhymes rarely measured up to Kim, which left a host of true school femcees like Bahamadia, Jean Grae, and Rah Digga to pick up the slack. But Jean Grae's career never took off (despite being extremely likable and clever), Bahamadia always sounded like Frieza from Dragonball Z, and Rah Digga is best known as the babysitter from "13 Ghosts". Trina was never taken seriously because shed always been too good-looking, and Mia X, Gangsta Boo and a slew of others had to deal with the double curse of being female and Southern, two things that until 2004, were hard obstacles to hurdle. So that just left Queen Latifah and Lauryn Hill, the former pulled a Will Smith and moved on from rap and the latter went fucking batshit. (Remy Ma's in jail and never got past the mixtape stage in her career so her faults go without saying) A lot been written about the dearth of female emcees and the reasons, but Nicki Minaj might be able to overcome that, despite suffering from nearly every flaw listed above.

Jean Grae and Bahamadia could rap, but their voices weren't all that great and weren't sexy enough to arouse interest or push units. Nicki also suffers from this, but after listening to her enough, that grating Rosie Perez, Queens-as-fuck accent becomes somewhat of an asset in being able to tell her apart from legions of other female MC's with "grating New York accents" (to quote Byron Crawford). Another potential chink is her close association to Lil' Wayne, which depending on how Drake does and how well Wayne can actually put out talent (no Tyga) could be good or bad. But judging by the fact that her first mixtape appearance had spot-on Harry Potter references and that she spazzes out on the "Donk" beat for this song is promising. I don't see an issue with a female Lil' Wayne with a better good-to-bad punchline ratio(as of post-Da Drought 3) and ridiculously heaving breasts.

Not that that's all she is but, really, those titties are reckless.

Luckily she seems to have been blessed with a good amount of self-awareness for a rapper in general, not just a femcee, which is good to see. Several interviews from this year have shown that she's trying to distance herself from being interpreted as a Lil' Kim clone (minus the pre-mortem Michael Jackson self-esteem kit) or merely a dime-a-dozen NY rapper with a marketable body. For most women, especially in hip-hop, there's an internal debate about just simply riding the wave of interest produced by your looks and displaying your talents without foregoing that very same aspect of your womanhood, and there is a fine balance there (to rhyme about riding dick or to not rhyme about riding dick), which Nicki Minaj not only seems extremely aware of, but she's trying to shift the conversation about her to something other than the fact that people want to see her naked (and would probably rather see her naked than hear her ape Lil' Wayne's cadences and inflections)

And with a voice like that, she should be trying to display depth. One hacked Sidekick might be all it would take to derail further interest in Nicki Minaj, Cassie-style, so establishing a more complex identity and becoming a better rapper is definitely a must. Although probably not as every instance showing that she's moving away from tat lane has two where she's using it for promotion. Her wackiness is her main asset right now, and it might be shallow to cosign a rapper for that reason alone, the field is kind of barren for female rappers (and Crime Mob sort of fell apart) and I can do without Lil'Mama/Bow Wow.

Pussy Done Dried Up Like Fast Money

I found one of the last public posts I ever made, on this Suicide Girls.com-oriented group, on Livejournal last year. I still use stolen passwords to view the site (or do I, e-police?), but a combination of growing older and finding the alt/scene culture aesthetic mostly artless and an ugly commodity of bored white teens and the declining interest/quality of the site makes me apathetic about this sort of thing. But, regardless, it's a surprisingly good quality diatribe, considering how much I hate everything I create.

Happy Halloween!

Culled from "SGirls" pseudo-anti-Suicide Girl community/LJ Drama group:

Does anyone ever consider that, although I was surprised to find that with HBO, the internet, a DVD, and Spin magazine a lot of people aren't aware of SG's existence, that eventually this whole "alt" thing will burn out like everything else does? Isn't it essentially pokemon with tits (or something synonymous from slash fiction, maybe)

There doesn't seem to be much foresight about this. Tastes change, people become fickle, and things fall apart. Most of the girls (with, obviously, some exceptions) on SG and Godsgirls and etc. aren't much any more different or intelligent or provocative or special as they're advertised. Maybe if you're from the suburbs or the midwest/biblebelt the idea of alt-porn might be strange and interesting, but it becomes too easy to see through the bullshit. Adorning a retarded white girl in sceneXclothes and copy/pasting her myspace/vampirefreaks.com interests to her profile doesn't make her any better than let's say some random Bangbros.com actress. Its gotten old, I dunno.

When I first ran into the whole SG/Burning Angel thing I thought it was amazing. This was back when there was maybe 50 SG's, and 14 year olds are easily impressed. Now there's 1200, and the SG's who left were the INTERESTING ones. The remainder all look alike (which is saying something for a scene website), and out of the hordes of leftovers, not even half would illicit a second glance. Whatever prestige and bragging rights (and boy, do they brag. I've been at plenty shows and seen as well as heard of girls running up to bands ranting about how they're SG's looking for some non-existant Willy Wonka pass at a death metal show) there were are gone. If the archetype has to do drastic Wal-mart deals and specials (3 sets a day? How many girls will that acrue by next year) to retain interest, how could the offshoots and knockoffs survive?

I think at this point, its halfway through 2006, I've been checking the site for 4 years now, and the "alt" thing has lost momentum, and maybe instead of 16-20 year old girls jumping to SG and every SG competitor, to give some thought about business and the inevitable truth of the internet, that any photo of you with make its way across the internet for all time (until we're all killed by the yellowstone caldera). Yeah, there are a lot of girls who just want to be naked or want to use these sites to get a fetish or nude modelling "career" going, and that's awesome, but by the looks of the many 18-20 year old girls who joined the site in the last year and a half, most are SG fans who just really wanted to be a SuicideGirl (or whatever knockoff would take them). I know people are retarded inherantly, but its not a very good sign of where we're at when you can actually hear girls say "I wanna be a suicide girl!", or "Do you think they'd accept me?"

This is off-topic, but I've also noticed a correlation between SG and the droves of annoying scene girls and their pretentious smugness and constant self-reference as "cunts". Once again, this shit might be cool in Arkansas or Utah (since everyone seems to love SLC Punk so much) but if you're a bohemian liberal hippie douchebag, which I guess is the base of alt-porn, it gets old. What is everyone going to do when all the positive and negative exposure doesn't do anything? It actually seems to have had a detrimental effect, seeing as the porn/media take Rob Rotten and Joanna Angel a lot more seriously tha SG or "GodsGirls". The people seem to be speaking, and they don't want cookie cutter pictures of cookie cutter girls with all of this faux-empowerment and air of self-importance, they want those same naked scene girls to get double penetrated on screen, with no Jhonen Vasquez or Boondock Saints references and no force-feeding of "substance". Alt-PORN might actualy continue to break the mainstream, because:

(1)SG is not porn, is not usually titillating and is not usually sexy. It really just boils down to naked scene girls. You could get the same effect by trolling myspace or playboy or phun.org or xpeeps or slipping someone a rufee at an Atreyu show. Having tattoos or piercings doesn't make you less boring or ugly. (And I acknowledge that there is a nebulus grey area on whether softcore porn is really porn and not nude modeling. But honestly, if you showed the average Bangbros or Clubjenna subsriber SG they would laugh and tell you that's not porn)

(2) Burning Angel, for any shared personality flaws inherant with twenty-soemthing tattoed white girls actually seems to have empowered women. If I had a friend who was taking a women studies liberal arts course, I'd refer her to "Cum on my tattoo", not SG or Godsgirls or Fatal Beauty or Blueblood or CityKittie, etc.