Taking a page from Nicki Minaj’s “Stupid Hoes,” here’s an easy lob: “Stupid Hoes” is kinda stupid.
It’s less so that the non-beat of this meandering rap track only augments the shrillness of Minaj’s character voices, but more that I keep expecting the star to move on from Lil Kim diss tracks. Her character Roman seems to have more worthy adversaries; she even quotes “Roman’s Revenge” — her track with Eminem — like she already knows it.
“Stupid hoes is my enemy / Stupid hoes is so wack / Stupid ho shoulda befriended me / Then she could”ve prolly came back,” comes the final refrain. Is that a tinge of support? A whiff of maybe propping other female rappers up? Naw. Most of the zingers come from Minaj alternating between male (albeit gay) alter-ego “Roman Zolanski” (“But no relation to Roman Polanski”) and the “frontman” of a the all-male Young Money: she invites her detractors to “suck her diznick,” then to eat her “coo-coo raw” then tips her hat to Lil Wayne’s “It’s Good” and returns to her line from Birdman’s “Y U Mad,” “I am the female Weezy.” As your mother asks, what’s wrong with just being yourself?
It’s lyrically weak, but as much as I expected from a song called “Stupid Hoes.” And I like Minaj. I do. It’s not like she’s way above crap like “Dance Ass” if she keeps getting paychecks for songs like “Dance Ass,” but her talent takes up much more space than snipes at Kim and her ilk. She’s obviously making a move more toward supporting “Reloaded” as a rap set as opposed to asserting herself as a cross-demo pop star. I just hope it’ll be a little more cohesive, and a lot less 2009.
“Roman Reloaded” is out on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14.