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Nicki Minaj is stunning on the December cover of Vogue Magazine draped in a goddess-like Valentino Haute Couture dress. Her hair is neatly styled to show off her gorgeous face. Set against a textured background, the cover resembles art. Her son, affectionately known as Papa Bear, also appears in the high-fashion spread. The images were captured by famed portrait photographer Norman Jean Roy.
This stripped-down version of Nicki Minaj comes ahead of the release of her highly anticipated album Pink Friday 2, which is set to drop on December 8, 2023.
“When I look back at a lot of my music, I’m like, Oh, my God, where was the me in it?” she told journalist Rob Haskell. “So for this album, I went back to the old game plan.”
Nicki is an open book in her cover story interview, touching on an array of topics including her marriage, motherhood, body positivity, and learning first-hand about addiction.
“I’m not in favor of body positivity if it means unhealthy bodies,” says Nicki who opened up about the topic of plastic surgery in the past. “That’s bull. It’s not believable, so let’s stop pretending.” She talked about recently undergoing a breast reduction. “I love it,” she shared. “I used to want a bigger butt, and now I look back and realize how silly that was. So — love your curves, and love your non-curves. There’s nothing wrong with any of it.”
Nicki first encountered addiction watching her late father go from putting crack in his weed to stealing his children’s possessions to fund his crack addiction. She recalled a time during an early point of her career when she got addicted to Percocet after being prescribed the drug for menstrual cramps.
“No one told me that this was a narcotic and this was addictive. Luckily I was able to ground myself,” she revealed. ‘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.”
Opening up about her controversial husband Kenneth Petty and their marriage, she revealed there was a time things got “testy” between them after the birth of their child. Nicki gave birth to Papa Bear during the pandemic, which was challenging for most parents navigating isolation.
“I’m not going to lie, things got testy between us,” she recalls. “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!”
She continued to talk about how motherhood affected her life and learning, despite her preconceived notions that she needed to work.
“I think that deep down inside, I believed that once I had a family, I would just lose the desire to make music,” she says. “I would always tell people, ‘Watch, when I have a child I’m going to cook every meal for him and bake cookies every day.’ Maybe subconsciously I hoped my focus would just be on being a mother, and I looked forward to that idea. It felt like a relief. But what happens is that you find out you have to work.”
Despite the hardships of motherhood, Nicki beams when she looks at her baby boy. “You know that feeling when you unlock one of the secrets of life?” she asks. “For me the idea of accepting what you can’t change—it just never clicked with me before. You want to have control over everything, but that’s the easiest way to be unhappy. So now, if I find myself trying to control it all, I try to remember what’s really important. I look in my son’s face, and my whole soul lights up. He has no clue how nerve-racking it’s been for me to be a mother and an artist.”
Read the full interview, here.
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