When the hip-hop legend André 3000 confused the world by releasing an album of experimental flute music earlier this yr, he provided a easy clarification for why he’s stopped rapping: “I’m 48 years previous,” he instructed GQ. He gave examples of non-public issues that he discovered lyrically unusable: “I acquired to go get a colonoscopy’ … ‘My eyesight goes dangerous.’ You could find cool methods to say it, however … ”

André was describing a problem dealing with many artists within the yr of hip-hop’s fiftieth birthday. The style started as an outlet for younger folks on the margins—as Ye as soon as rapped, “We wasn’t speculated to make it previous 25”—however now its defining figures have reached center age. Theoretically, rap can inform any kind of story. However artists of a sure age seem uncertain in regards to the worth of channeling their experiences into verses. One of many yr’s most acclaimed hip-hop releases, Maps, by the producer Kenny Segal and the rapper billy woods, is a meta-memoir about midlife burnout. The sometimes provocative Danny Brown not too long ago put out a defeated-sounding album, Quaranta, whose opening refrain asks, “You 40, nonetheless doing this shit?”

Nicki Minaj, 41, is the most recent rapper to launch a midlife manifesto that’s heavy with ambivalence. When she rose to prominence a couple of decade and a half in the past, she was the consummate younger gun, stomping throughout her elders on their very own tracks. Her energy lay in her skillful theatricality, which allowed her to dart amongst accents and cadences whereas sustaining wit and vigor. Her killer-Barbie persona, girlish and monstrous, did appear to be it might finally lose its novelty. However the prospects for her future had been limitless. Minaj was clearly a expertise who may rap about something and make it fascinating—even, maybe, her eye-exam outcomes.

Immediately, her affect is in all places—each within the proliferation of profitable feminine emcees and within the rise of character actors–slash-rappers equivalent to Lil Nas X (a longtime Minaj stan). Minaj herself has remained a gentle, or actually a static, presence because the hip-hop panorama has shifted in her picture. Over 4 studio albums and a slew of singles and visitor verses, she has provided styles of the identical recipes that she first shocked the world with. Her hits have been humorous but interchangeable and caught on a small set of lyrical matters. Most of her verses assert her because the queen of rap, usually by sniping at hip-hop’s promising younger ladies.

Her new album, Pink Friday 2—her fifth, and her first in 5 years—has been marketed as a reset. The title calls again to her debut, which had a temper of risk and optimism that she has mentioned she needs to reconnect with. She additionally needs to get private: “Once I look again at a number of my music, I’m like, Oh, my God, the place was the me in it?” she instructed Vogue. In 2019, she married a childhood sweetheart (who’s frequently in headlines associated to his 1995 conviction for tried rape), and in 2020, she gave start to a son. Motherhood, she instructed Vogue, was epiphanic: “You realize that feeling if you unlock one of many secrets and techniques of life?”

The tone of Pink Friday 2 is totally different than those she has prized earlier than—now she’s capital-S severe. The album’s opening observe, “Are You Gone Already,” lifts the hymnlike vocals of a Billie Eilish ballad as a backdrop for Minaj reflecting on her father’s 2021 demise from a hit-and-run automobile accident. The one “Final Time I Noticed You” is a equally ghostly synth-pop observe expressing regret over a misplaced love. Different songs on the 22-track album sort out motherhood and marriage with dramatic strings and stern bass strains.

These tracks, nevertheless, are lacking one thing: vivid rapping. She spends a lot of them delivering mind-numbingly imprecise lyrics in a lullaby tone: “Not too long ago grew to become a mama and it thrills me,” she sings on “Blessings,” a line that just about appears like a punch line given how un-thrilling it’s. When she does rap concretely about severe topics, the wordplay simply isn’t very impressed. “My coronary heart sayin’ I like him whereas I’m screamin’ that I hate him,” generic although it appears, might be Minaj’s finest line on “Let Me Calm Down,” a duet with J. Cole about preventing with one’s partner. The album nearer, “Simply the Reminiscences,” opens with an intriguing scene—Minaj feeling low on the best way to a present and debating calling it off—earlier than she flashes again to scenes of earlier triumphs. The listener is left curious for extra element about her current tenses.

The issue right here will not be the subject material, however Minaj’s strategy to it. She applies rather more precision, humor, and energy to the album’s glut of acquainted fare: porny boasts or Downfall-style rants towards perceived enemies within the rap world. (An amazing second: Her indignant supply of “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe!” on “Tremendous Freaky Lady.”) To make sure, for all their ferocity, these songs present nearly no development or innovation, which makes her a bit hypocritical: Repeatedly she accuses different ladies of ripping her off—“Tryna construct one other Barbie doll, screw’s free”—even whereas Minaj herself recycles previous flows and makes use of the least authentic samples conceivable (from classics equivalent to Blondie’s “Coronary heart of Glass” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Women Simply Wish to Have Enjoyable”).

Clearly, choosing fights conjures up Minaj greater than digging into new emotional terrain or observing her day-to-day life. And he or she definitely doesn’t owe the general public any intimacy. However what if she used her abilities of character creation and writerly creativeness to broach the tough topics she appears to wish to handle? What if she confirmed her viewers what “thrills” her as of late past her previous pleasures, disses and designer garments? Do mature and private additionally should imply solemn or boring? The unmet potential of Pink Friday 2 is so nice that it’s nearly, in a bizarre means, thrilling, indicating all the instructions Minaj may push within the years to return. In any case, for her and for hip-hop, center age continues to be fairly new.