TIME magazine released their annual “100 Most Influential People” issue and rap artist Nicki Minaj scored a cover. She joins Leonardo DiCaprio, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Christine Lagarde, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Priyanka Chopra.
In her interview for TIME she spoke on business, Beyonce and cultural appropriation.
“I think black women are held to a higher standard. A lot of times pop culture takes from black culture and often times doesn’t really say they got it from black culture. Magazines are like its just being done for the first time because it’s on a white woman’s head, or a white woman’s body and you have to get use to living in a world that doesn’t even acknowledge you did certain things.”
Lil Wayne widely known for putting Nicki on wrote a short and sweet Facebook status about the TIME magazine dubbed “icon.”
He wrote:
“You know, in New York they used to have these street DVDs. It just so happened that I appeared in one, and when I looked at the finished product, Nicki Minaj was on a part of the DVD. I was like, “Woooooow!” She was just being Nicki without the glitz and glamour. When I heard the first two and four bars, it wasn’t even about her rapping better than any female rapper. It was about, man, she’s rapping better than other rappers—period.
I always wanted more for my artists and saw Nicki’s potential from the first moment I laid eyes on her. She’s reached far beyond everything I would have imagined. Man, she’s so influential and doing all the right things. She’s an icon, a boss and a role model to all these young girls out here on how to do it the right way. Her work ethic speaks volumes and has yielded these results. The scary thing is she’s still going. Ha! Nicki Minaj will go down as one of the best to do it in the history of music.”
