Being the often random rocket that we are, we recently stumbled across this Vogue photo of Nicki Minaj turned completely blue. We immediately thought “Na’vi Nicki Minaj?” while others thought “Smurf Minaj?” and Jezebel thought “Miss Argentina from Beetlejuice?” (By far the most accurate comparison, we think.)
The name rattled around our rocket brain. Nicki Minaj, Nicki Minaj… where have we heard that name before?
Oh yeah, at the forefront of nerdy projects!
The Vogue photo brought to mind how Minaj recently nerded it up steampunk style in her recent video for “Turn Me On.” (A video that we feel nails the steampunk aesthetic far more authentically than Justin Bieber’s latest limply-thrown steampunk effort.)
Then we remembered Nicki’s cameo in this Lonely Island video creating “The Creep,” a new dance in honor of John Waters.
That’s not her only dip into nerdiness. She dressed as Freddy Krueger in Ludacris’ video “My Chick Bad” and she’s following up on her first record Pink Friday with a sophomore effort titled Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, which contains the single “Starships.”
So far, her references to nerd pop culture have the air of a genuine appreciation and fun as opposed to any sort of audience pandering. i.e. We can imagine she thought that steampunk aesthetic simply looked cool, so she made video center around that look. (And she certainly looks like she’s having fun in the Lonely Island video.)
Nicki Minaj is a big fun nerd and we love it. We look forward to her inevitable cameo in Community.
Stubby the Rocket is the mascot and voice of Tor.com and if this were three years ago it would have made a “inevitable cameo in Lost” joke instead. The times they are a’changin’.
