In terms of oxygen consumed on social media, not even Taylor Swift making it to the Super Bowl could compete with the real main event of the weekend: the very public drawing of the battle lines between two hip-hop titans. contemporary.
In 72 hours, Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion released songs directed at each other with varying degrees of candor. Here's what you need to know about “Hiss,” “Big Foot,” and what led to hip-hop success.
What is happening?
At midnight on Friday, Megan Thee Stallion released “Hiss,” a three-minute track that gets hotter and hotter. The song, the second single from her upcoming third studio album, finds the rapper in defiant mode, unleashing bar after bar about her unparalleled mainstream and how the media uses her name “to get likes and views.” “Every time I'm mentioned,” she says in a passionate, no-holds-barred introduction, her detractors “receive 24-hour attention.”
But it was a line just under a minute from the song that sparked four days (and counting) of hostilities. Her opponents “don't be mad at Megan,” he raps, but instead are “mad at Megan's Law,” invoking a 1996 law requiring registration and public identification of convicted sex offenders.
Many interpreted the reference as a dig at Nicki Minaj's husband, Kenneth Petty, who was arrested in 2020 for failing to register as a sex offender in California. (Mr. Petty pleaded guilty to attempted rape when he was a teenager in Queens.)
While Ms. Minaj was not mentioned by name, she seemed to take the lines personally. On Monday she released her own song in response, “Big Foot,” in which she makes repeated direct references to Megan Thee Stallion, including, notably, her 2020 assault by rapper Tory Lanez, who shot her in the foot and is now serving time. of 10 years. imprisonment. Ahead of its release, Ms. Minaj mocked the single in X using an image of a visibly upset Megan Thee Stallion.
Alright, who started it?
While it may seem like Megan Thee Stallion's song sparked the explosion, tensions have been simmering between the rappers for years. In 2020, Megan Thee Stallion appeared on Cardi B's “WAP,” an immediate No. 1 hit on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart. Given Minaj's long-standing and well-documented issues with Cardi B (at a New York Fashion Week party in 2018, things got physical), that may have spelled the end of the era of good feelings between Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion.
Wait, didn't they have a song together?
Ah, were we ever so young? In fact, Megan Thee Stallion and Ms. Minaj collaborated on Megan Thee Stallion’s semantically fertile 2019 song “Hot Girl Summer,” which also featured rapper Ty Dolla Sign. The music video earned an MTV Video Music Award and a BET Award.
Which side is the Internet on?
It's safe to say that the most passionately committed Barbz, as Ms. Minaj's fans are known, remain firmly in her camp. But even some longtime Minaj supporters may have been put off by an extended riff in “Big Foot” about a “dead mom,” given the death of Megan Thee Stallion's mother in 2019.
Since the song's release, many have taken to social media to express, if not surprise, then perhaps disappointment with the rapper. Minaj has been known to have public feuds with other artists, including Taylor Swift, Remy Ma and Miley Cyrus.
