Nicki Minaj on Hot 97 – Rosenberg Interviews Nicki Minaj

There are four kinds of people who will enjoy this interview between Hot 97’s Peter Rosenberg and Nicki Minaj.

1) People who love drama in hip hop (i.e., fans of Love & Hip Hop and the like)

2) People who study the behind-the-scenes mechanisms of hip hop, hip hop radio and New York hip hop

3) Fans of Nicki Minaj and/or Peter Rosenberg

4) People who are fascinated by the Nicki Minaj phenomenon.

I’m 2 & 4. Regular ol’ people might not care too much, but for some of us, it was interesting to see these two speak face to face.

Knowing that Hot 97 (and possibly Nicki) probably won’t do anything without any financial reason (i.e., not likely to patch things up with Nicki Minaj for the sake of hip hop, or New York hip hop, or because it was the right thing to do…) likely there is some financial benefit to doing so… But I always like to hear from Nicki, even if it is under the umbrella of a distracting, drama-filled relationship with New York’s more schizophrenic hip hop radio station.

In short, the generally genuine-sounding Rosenberg defended his hip hop pedigree, and explained why he said what he said that caused the Summer Jam “fiasco,” and why it shouldn’t have taken on such a life of its own.

Using many of the arguments I’ve personally used to defend her, Nicki defended herself a bit against some of her more controversial moves in her career (including letting it be known she is planning to come back to her hip hop core, something I mentioned in the past that I thought she would do at some point.)

EBro did his usual job of talking through both sides of his face and directing the interview where he wanted it to go, probably to best serve whatever purpose they are trying to serve.

So, aside from my cynicism, (until I see better proof that Hot 97 is truly down for hip hop, I’ll just assume this was all setup, not a “finally, let’s clear the air for the sake of it” discussion), overall, it was good to see this kind of dialog.