One bar in Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘Hiss’ sent Nicki Minaj into a 72-hourlong online spiral
OPINION: Nicki’s response track was less than mid, and the internet is still clowning her for it.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
When Megan Thee Stallion dropped her diss track “Hiss” at midnight on Friday, Nicki Minaj responded on Twitter (we still not calling it X, so cry somewhere else, Apartheid Clyde) within 22 minutes, and at the time I published my first column about it, she was still going. That was at least 12 hours after the song dropped, but less than 24 hours.
I make a note of the timestamps because Nicki Minaj continued to rant and rave about Megan Thee Stallion for 72 hours with almost no breaks.
She alternated between raging on Twitter and aimlessly rambling on Instagram Live and during some of those moments, she teased tidbits of the supposed hot diss track she had been holding in the vault for some time, but what she proffered in those moments was akin to Dr. Seuss rhymes about Megan having big feet, as I wrote about before.
She made several disgusting comments about Megan’s mother being dead, which led to people commenting on the fact that Minaj has also lost a parent; her father was killed in a hit-and-run accident on Long Island in 2021, and people who were defending Megan didn’t hesitate to make jokes about that.
The entire time Minaj was ranting, people kept calling for her to release her diss track. She is, after all, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Rap.” Surely she had some hot heat in the chamber for Meg, right?
Y’all, I’m here to tell you that she in fact did not have hot heat in the chamber for Meg.
As I type this, she’s still ranting on Twitter, but just 22 minutes before her online spiral reached the 72-hour mark — at midnight last night, she released the track “Big Foot,” and the internet collectively groaned with displeasure at the mid-ness of it all.
“Big Foot” is basically a regurgitation of all the aimless rambling she did on IG Live and Twitter, thrown against a beat someone created on a Casio keyboard.
That’s probably because she couldn’t get anyone to let her use a track to diss Megan on.
She initially said she had a track from Lil Ju, but when she asked if she could use it, she was told “no,” and Lil Ju himself put a tweet out that seemed to vaguely reference his stance on the matter.
Ju Ju has done a lot of work with Megan and produced some of her hottest tracks, so it’s understandable that he would stand with the artist who is actively putting money in his pocket.
The lyrics were very simple and unoriginal. There was nothing compelling in the rap and there was no rhyme scheme. She simply said “foot” a bunch of times and “Megan” and that was the extent of it. There was a bar in there about Pardi and Trey Songz and Tory Lanez, but the entire song sounded like someone who didn’t really put a lot of thought into what they wanted to say before they said it.
The “Mine Name Is Peaches” rap from “Coming to America” was better than this.
At the end, she goes into a 90-second slurred spoken word rant, and I…
Nicki acted like she had all this smoke for Megan, and in the end, it was imaginary smoke. It was steam and not even a big rush of steam like from a caboose or something. It was that little hiss of steam that came out of your iron when you put water in it before adding that crease to your khakis.
This was her beefs with Remy Ma and Lil Kim all over again. She didn’t have a real answer for them either, and it makes me wonder where is the fabled Nicki that everyone says has a wicked pen game?
Where is the Nicki who allegedly wrote the verse on “Monster” that made us all say that was her song and not Kanye’s?
She claims to have four more songs to release, but if they are anything like this one, she should probably keep them to herself.
Never in my life did I think I would see another rapper kill their career in real time over the internet, yet, here we are.
When it happened with Kanye, it was easy to say that we all expected it at some point. He had been spiraling for a long time, and his behavior was getting more and more erratic as time went on. His ex-wife talked about it on her show, and far be it for me to side with Kim Kardashian on anything, but the one thing we agree on is the fact that Kanye was not well, and it did not seem to be getting any better.
I’m going to be honest and say that I stopped being a Nicki Minaj fan a long time ago.
I hate bullies, and her behavior toward up-and-coming young Black women rappers was reminiscent of someone who was trying to assert their dominance on a cell block or a schoolyard. It was borne of insecurity and intimidation, and it manifested itself in ugly ways that we all saw play out on the internet.
That’s the thing about social media. It has given us a peek at what our favorite celebrities are like when their handlers aren’t around and they are allowed to post whatever they are thinking in the moment unchecked.
Even if they delete the things they said, the internet is forever (word to Cardi B), and someone will have a screenshot or a download of the video even if said celebrity has since tried to erase it from our memories.
Nicki is particularly nasty to the new school of rap girlies, and she adds an extra layer of ick to it by weaponizing her fanbase against them as well as anyone else who dares to say anything critical about her on the internet.
This is a fact that everyone acknowledges, and it has made her less likable over the years.
As this played out over the weekend, I couldn’t help but repeatedly ask where were her people. Does she have a team? How are they letting her spiral openly like this on the internet without stopping her?
She exists in a vacuum where her every thought is bounced through the echo chamber of her rabid fans who affirm and agree with everything she says.
When she makes wild allegations about her popularity and success on the charts, she only uses tweets from fan accounts who say favorable things about her.
She seems to be lacking in self-awareness, and she spent a lot of time this weekend blaming Megan for the fact that she wasn’t able to use the track she wanted to use for her diss record.
She claims Megan and Roc Nation are conspiring to block her from success because Megan is afraid of her, and the funniest part about all of that is Megan dropped that track Friday night and dipped.
We haven’t heard a peep from Megan since. The only tweets and posts from her were posts to amplify her song “Hiss,” and honestly she didn’t even need to do that because Nicki Minaj was Megan’s one-woman PR team the entire weekend the way she kept Megan’s name in her mouth.
It’s a sad state of affairs and an unfortunate thing to watch, but it’s also an example of how some people live in a constant state of lack and believe that a win for someone else means a loss for them.
The world doesn’t work like that.
In this world, there was room for a Megan and a Nicki, but sadly, Nicki couldn’t see that, so through her words and actions, she has made it entirely Megan’s world at this point.
Do we have a new “Queen of Rap”? Possibly.
I can’t see any way for Nicki to redeem herself after this. She has come completely undone and unraveled in front of the entire world.
Let’s pray that she gets back on her good foot, cause this ain’t it.
Monique Judge is a storyteller, content creator and writer living in Los Angeles. She is a word nerd who is a fan of the Oxford comma, spends way too much time on Twitter, and has more graphic t-shirts than you. Follow her on Twitter @thejournalista or check her out at moniquejudge.com.
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