Today is Nicki Minaj’s 41st birthday, and one of many surprises on her fifth album is the arrival of Billie Eilish’s haunting voice as the first sound, on a song that sees the usually imperious Trinidadian rapper expressing vulnerability as a mother and wife. “Why would anyone want to love me?/Rich, yes, but are you happy?” Minaj sings. The Eilish song she samples is When the Party’s Over.
Is the biggest, brashest, most outrageous queen of rap in the process of abdicating? In the years since her last release in 2018, she’s married a man she’s known since high school in New York and had a son, who she says in the song is now three.
