Nicki Minaj Is Vogue’s December 2023 Cover Star

She opens up about her highly anticipated new project 7giving birth to her son during the pandemic

“There’s a freeness that you have around you when you’re at your best, when you’re doing your thing at your peak.” So says Nicki Minaj, who has been hard at work writing, recording, mixing, and re-mixing her fifth studio album, “Pink Friday 2,” out next month. For the best-selling female rapper of all time, now 13 years into her career, the new record represents a return to form. “When I look back at a lot of my music, I’m like, Oh, my God, where was the me in it?” Minaj says. “So for this album, I went back to the old game plan.”

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Nicki Minaj wants to be understood. “I’m a bit…particular,” says the star. “Sometimes things that the best engineer in the world wouldn’t hear, I hear. And you know what? I am always right.” A scholar of her genre and a rigorous wordsmith, she is also a painstaking listener of her own music; she combs through her recordings, rewrites verses, changes up her tone, adds drums, subtracts them. (There were 27 versions of “Anaconda,” her 2014 hit, before she blessed the single.)

For Vogue’s December Issue, @nickiminaj opens up about her highly anticipated new project; giving birth to her son amid the isolative unease of the pandemic; and feeling at peace with her body—something that encourages in other women, too.