The release date of Nicki Minaj‘s new album has been pushed to her birthday, but fans (a.k.a. the Barbz) can read her Vogue cover story in the meantime.
In the interview, the rapper described Pink Friday 2, out Dec. 8: “When I look back at a lot of my music, I’m like, Oh, my God, where was the me in it?” she said. “So, for this album, I went back to the old game plan.”
Minaj also opened up about an early period in her career when she briefly lived in Atlanta and was prescribed Percocet for menstrual pain. “No one told me that this was a narcotic and this was addictive,” she said while relating the experience to her late father’s addiction. “Luckily, I was able to ground myself. But — once an addict, always an addict. I feel like if you’ve ever experienced addiction to anything, which I have, you always have to think twice and three times about the choices that you make.”
She also touched on the relationship between substance abuse and fame. “Look at some of our biggest celebrities,” she said. “They eventually either get laughed out of wanting to go outside anymore, like Michael Jackson, or criticized, like Whitney Houston, or they fight silent battles, like Prince. These are some of the greatest of all time.”
Elsewhere in the story, Minaj discussed parenting with her husband Kenneth Petty, who was sentenced to house arrest in September. (We still haven’t learned her son’s name, born in Sept. 2020, although she refers to him as “Papa Bear”).
“I’m not going to lie, things got testy between us,” she said of her relationship with Petty. “Because of our history, I think we knew we’d get past it. But there’s no such thing as confidence in parenthood. I kind of wish that someone had told me — although I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to understand it — that there’s a level of anxiety, and you think it’s going to go away, but in fact it gets scarier. So often you think: I don’t know how to do this!”
Despite MTV canceling the 2023 EMAs due to the “volatility of world events,” Minaj was nominated for four awards: Best Artist, Biggest Fans, Best Hip-Hop, and Best U.S. Act, the latter two of which she won. On Oct. 20, she dropped “For All the Barbz,” which was featured on Rolling Stone‘s Song You Need to Know playlist. Next month, she’ll perform two dates at the 2023 Jingle Ball.