When the hip-hop legend André 3000 confused the world by releasing an album of experimental flute music earlier this 12 months, he provided a easy rationalization for why he’s stopped rapping: “I’m 48 years previous,” he instructed GQ. He gave examples of non-public considerations that he discovered lyrically unusable: “I bought to go get a colonoscopy’ … ‘My eyesight goes unhealthy.’ You will discover cool methods to say it, however … ”

André was describing a problem going through many artists within the 12 months of hip-hop’s fiftieth birthday. The style started as an outlet for younger individuals on the margins—as Ye as soon as rapped, “We wasn’t purported to make it previous 25”—however now its defining figures have reached center age. Theoretically, rap can inform any type of story. However artists of a sure age seem not sure concerning the worth of channeling their experiences into verses. One of many 12 months’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 usually provocative Danny Brown just lately 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 few 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 seem to be it will finally lose its novelty. However the prospects for her future had been countless. Minaj was clearly a expertise who might rap about something and make it attention-grabbing—even, maybe, her eye-exam outcomes.

Right now, her affect is in all places—each within the proliferation of profitable feminine emcees and within the rise of character actors–slash-rappers resembling 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 kinds 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 subjects. Most of her verses assert her because the queen of rap, typically 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 identify calls again to her debut, which had a temper of risk and optimism that she has stated she desires to reconnect with. She additionally desires 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 regularly 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: “ that feeling while 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 automotive accident. The only “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 turned a mama and it thrills me,” she sings on “Blessings,” a line that nearly looks 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 greatest line on “Let Me Calm Down,” a duet with J. Cole about preventing with one’s partner. The album nearer, “Simply the Recollections,” 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 far more precision, humor, and energy to the album’s glut of acquainted fare: porny boasts or Downfall-style rants in opposition to perceived enemies within the rap world. (An awesome second: Her offended supply of “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe!” on “Tremendous Freaky Woman.”) To make sure, for all their ferocity, these songs present nearly no progress or innovation, which makes her a bit hypocritical: Many times 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 unique samples conceivable (from classics resembling Blondie’s “Coronary heart of Glass” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Women Simply Wish to Have Enjoyable”).

Clearly, selecting fights evokes Minaj greater than digging into new emotional terrain or observing her day-to-day life. And she or he actually doesn’t owe the general public any intimacy. However what if she used her abilities of character creation and writerly creativeness to broach the difficult topics she appears to wish to deal with? 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 need to 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 might push within the years to return. In spite of everything, for her and for hip-hop, center age remains to be fairly new.