Nicki Minaj featured on the track Monster alongside Jay Z on Kanye’s fifth solo studio album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and has praised him for letting her rap on the song, because it helped to give her a platform.
She said, “it’s sort of amazing but I keep saying that Kanye; he gave me an amazing opportunity and because of that I feel like he outshines everyone. He puts people in a position to do better.”
The Anaconda hitmaker has since released three studio albums but still has a lot of respect for Kanye because he is “selfless” when it comes to helping to promote new artists.
She told Capital FM, “when you are an artist and you can do that for people then you are the king, you are the one, and that’s how I look at him. He did it in a really selfless way, he didn’t have anything to gain from it. And that’s what I’ve always respected and loved him for.”
The praise comes just days after Kanye spoke about their collaboration during a talk at the University of Oxford in England, joking she “kicked [his] *ss” on the track.
He said, “One of the most memorable things about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was Nicki Minaj, and the fact that she kicked my *ss, on my own song, on one of the best albums…the best album – I’m just saying what the critics said – of the last 25 years. The best album of the past 25 years that I spent a year and a half making, out there. I was exiled from my country, it was a personal exile, but exile. To come back and deliver my magnum opus of a work, and to be outshined…to be beat by a girl, basically.”
Nicki Minaj however thought about cancelling her tour after a member of her crew was killed last month.
She confessed that she feels as though she’s had no time to come to terms with the death of De’Von Pickett, who was stabbed to death in a bar in Philadelphia in February, because of her busy concert schedule, saying, “I don’t think people understand how fast-paced this business is. You never get a chance sometimes to do what normal people do, like mourn a loss. Everything happens so fast.”
Nicki said that Pickett was a part of her “crew” and finds it “devastating to think someone can work somewhere, make a living and then lose their life over absolutely nothing”.
She admits that it was hard to continue working when she and the rest of her crew were grieving for their late colleague but she claims that she decided to go ahead with her Pinkprint tour so that Pierce Boykin (the man who has been charged with his murder) doesn’t “win.”
She told the Metro newspaper, “my band members took it very hard. They were with him all the time and toured with him for years. When I came to rehearsal after he had been killed, the look on everyone’s face. It was heart-wrenching. I can’t let anything stop us from putting on the show because that would be quitting. So we’re going to continue the tour in his memory.”
Pickett was at a bar with his colleague, Eric Parker, when he was allegedly attacked by Boykin.
Nicki said on Twitter at the time: “Two members of my team were stabbed last night in Philly. One was killed. They had only been there two days rehearsing for the tour (sic).”
