Nicki Minaj's 2 Lit 2 Late Interlude
I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.
Nicki Minaj's 2 Lit 2 Late Interlude
Happy birthday, Nicki.
So what song of Nicki's are we covering today? Nicki's highest positioned song on Billboard ever, number 3, "Super Bass"? "Feeling Myself", featuring Beyonce? What about her off-kilter, out-of-pocket "Come on a Cone"? Her killer verse in Kanye's "Monster"? (Nicki was on "ye" (2018)?? Dude, how did I not know that?) "Truffle Butter" from "The Pinkprint" (2014), featuring current internet clown, Drake (I'm sure fortunes will reverse at some point in the future), Lil Wayne, who I think has a right to be upset, and not angry, about not playing at the next Super Bowl in New Orleans, the place he was born, and Chris Brown, "second most hated nigga in America", who will never be forgotten for the one thing he did? (God, how old does all this name-dropping make you feel?) What about a track on her rap-heavy album "Queen" (2018), like "Chun-Li"? What about my personal favorite track on "Queen", "LLC"?
"I know," everyone is clearly thinking, "what about the less-than-a-minute, interlude track on Queen, literally called 2 Lit 2 Late Interlude?"
Well, first, why this song. I have listened to this song a billion times. This already propels it over any other candidates. So why do I listen to this song so much.
My first introduction to Nicki Minaj begins with "Come on a Cone". If you're familiar with it, you sorta see where this is going. If you're not, here are some lyrics:
Why the fuck am I styling? I competes with myself, when you went against Nicki, you depleted your wealth, and I'm not masturbating, but I'm feeling myself, paparazzi is waiting, 'cause them pictures will sell, now don't you feel stupid, that's egg on your face, if you wasn't so ugly, I'd put my dick in your face.
Diiiiick in your face, put my diiiick in your face, yeah.
So, since 2012, I have been a fan.
The weirder music is, the better. The more music miscegenates, the better. I don't believe in purity, but then again, I'm a writer of the postmodern tradition. I think all of Nicki's albums are messes - get to that later - but I think I like the idea of "Queen" the least because it's just rapping.
What a sadness that I didn't have a chance, and will not have a chance, to write about David Bowie this year. David, through ""Heroes"", showed me how artists never wear one face, they take on different faces for different projects, and once they put on a face they fucking wear it. I'm disappointed I never got to write about his raging, his frothing, his mind-breaking "JOEEEEEEEEEEE THE LION" in the song "Joe the Lion". If you've only heard the title track, "Joe the Lion" will torpedo your current image of Bowie. He sounds genuinely deranged in that track, gritting his teeth as he "slithers down the greasy pipe".
Apologies for going off on that substantial tangent on Bowie, but I use him to demonstrate why Nicki is so great: most artists can only manage one face, which they sell dearly and often like a brand, but Nicki can wear multiple, it's her signature talent. She's a joker in "Come on a Cone", she's a monster in "Monster", she's bubbly in "Super Bass", she's "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss" in "LLC", and she's so good at these roles because she commits, like an actor would. No one will replicate Bowie's success, because he is, and I haven't seen an artist like Nicki Minaj, even a decade after the peak of her popularity, not Cardi B, not Megan Thee Stallion, not Ice Spice, and so, to me, Nicki is still in a position to surprise everybody.
Nicki's strength is in making you think she's one thing, making a killer track, and then pulling back and becoming another thing; the audience is left with the pieces, figuring out where the actual artist is in all of them. Because these various personalities do, in fact, reveal one person, have a consistent theme. That person is described well in Kanye's "Monster": there is a human hidden beneath the monster, beneath the luxury clothing, the watches, beneath the layers of paranoia that come with fame and the trauma that came from one's salad days when one was not famous.
That's why I love "2 Lit 2 Late" so much: I think it's the clearest expression of her person I can think of, an accidentally-perfect confluence of all of her personas, coming unconsciously, where she is not deliberately choosing who it is you see at the moment. It's a very short song about her need for a true, honest love, but it's not characterized by sadness, as these songs often are; rather, her "real" personality, her blunt personality comes through, she looks at the issue honestly and with clarity, and she moves on, in a more "girlboss" and adult way than she has displayed in any of her other music. In short, it's a song about reality by an artist who always approached reality colorfully, prismatically.
The song arguably has three sections.
The first section,
I said I'm cool on it, baby, yeah (I'm straight), you say It's love, I don't want it, yeah (too late), boy, you're too much, too little, yeah (too late), you do too much, too little, yeah (too late),
is accompanied with the warmth of a steel drum and the classic trap beat. These two instrumentals play with each other; the former bubbles up and down in the track, like peals of sunshine, while the latter skitters and scatters, revealing a darker undercurrent to the song that Nicki isn't willing to reveal, but whose darkness she'll reveal in the other tracks in "Queen". This darkness is further emphasized by the descent in notes by the steel drum, which convey her doubts, the opposite end of her mania. Remember, this song is 55 seconds long.
I've probably mentioned a million times in these songs-of-the-week that I much prefer lyrics written in conversational speak over flowery, poetic lyrics. The point of lyrics is to get to the heart of things, to get to emotion. Nicki saying she's "cool on it" is ... there's no other way to put it, that describes perfectly how she feels. It's not a relationship that was spectacularly killed off, it was a relationship that just cooled off. Better metaphor than in most books. "You say It's love, I don't want it" is also the perfect expression of indifference. Then there's the perfect aptness of "you're too much, too little ... you do too much, too little", which isn't saying that her lover is inadequate, more that he's just not put together in the right combination. There's no bitterness in this song; there's not much sadness; but there's a lot of melancholy, almost a numbness that comes from recognizing that a relationship is ending. It's as melancholic as a Morrissey song.
As a note, you have to listen to the song. It has an interesting amount of complexity, particularly with the vocal dubs in this first section. After the second line, a dub sings "you're too late" melismatically before it fades into the aether; after the third line, a dub sings "yuh, yuh, yuh". Both dubs convey the passing wind, passing thought, as if these words are floating in the dark of Nicki's mind. After the fourth line, there's a final, reverberating "too late" overdubbed over Nicki's own, as if God himself thundered the revelation in the air. What's incredible is that they don't make the song sound "busy", they're perfectly placed, and they add so many interesting elements to a song that, on its face, is very straightforward.
The second section goes:
Boy you're too much, too little, yeah, too late, boy you're too much, too little, yeah, too late, boy you're too ...
OK, you get it. If you're wondering why Nicki injects the "yeah" between "too little" and "too late", well, one interpretation is that she's hesitating as to whether it actually is too late. The other is simple: look at the meter. "Boy you're" - short, long - iamb. "Too much" - short, long - iamb. "Too lit-" - iamb. "-tle, yeah" - iamb. The lines are in iambic pentameter, just like fucking Shakespeare's. Does Nicki understand meter? She probably couldn't tell you what it technically is. But having penned so many verses? Yeah, she unconsciously understands. She's letting the line walk long, as she reflects on her thoughts.
There are seven of the lines above; after the fourth repetition, she has a dubbed-over track of herself singing "mu-u-u-u-u-ch". By the final "too little, yeah, too late", the dubbed vocal becomes a chorus, and the final conclusion of these four-line verses is "boy you're too much, I'm cool on it, I'm straight", as if she's done battling with herself.
The third section, accompanied with only the steel drum, and the "clicking" instrumental that I think amusingly intros "Beez in the Trap" (2012):
You shoulda been listening, listening in, too busy glistening, glistening in, why you ain't listen then, listen back then, now you're too much, too little, yeah, too late.
No anger, no tears, just straight-up facts. I love this song for that quality.
I think, because of the nature of the song, that it's about the confidence and nagging doubts following the break-up of a relationship, it's immensely replayable. Most songs of this type, you're exhausted by the extremity of emotions. In other songs, the artist may get too caught up in details. But because the song is so short, it's oddly a song about life, about the fact that you're never too certain as to why you broke up with your ex, but you have to move on regardless. Dude. I put this song on so many playlists. It's such a mood. And thus it's, hilariously, my favorite song of Nicki's. As a sidenote, I really wanted to write about "Your Love" as a double-feature, but I did not realize I had so much to write about for "2 Lit 2 Late". I GUESS IT'LL HAVE TO WAIT FOR NEXT TIME.
I talked earlier about Nicki's albums being messes. I think the issue is that she has too many personas. It's hard to juggle them across an entire album, and an album, ideally, is like 8-10 tracks long. In comparison, Beyoncé - see, it's literally never fair to compare anyone to Beyoncé, but here we go - juggles four to five faces in "Lemonade", demonstrated in "Pray You Catch Me", "Hold Up", "Don't Hurt Yourself", and "Sandcastles", five if you count the non-personal "Freedom" and "Formation", and Beyoncé has the benefit of all of these voices revolving around the complex topic of the breakdown of her marriage. Nicki, instead, makes very long albums to try to give space to all of her ideas, which I think is good for Spotify's algorithms, but not good for an audience who wants her Capital-A album.
This is probably why she dialed herself back in "Queen", but she only wears one mode, that is, aggressive. It's overall a fairly bland record but also an interesting record from a woman who can occupy multiple lanes. That's why "2 Lit 2 Late Interlude" is such a warm oasis in an album where Nicki feels very defensive, and it's the song that feels most like her.
I do want to see "Super Bass" Nicki come back. I know people shit on her a lot for that and "Starships", but ... that's her at her most interesting. Like, no female artist since has done songs like that. None. SZA? Nope. Missy Elliott? Nope. I'm not fucking joking, I literally can't think of anyone. No one does sheer pop exuberance as Nicki Minaj does - no one has sheer crossover appeal as Nicki Minaj does. What, "Renaissance"? It's not so much Beyoncé found an audience so much as she built a four-lane highway toward them, which is admirable in of itself. Nicki really tapped into the popularity of EDM in the beginning of the 2010s and added a distinct personality onto it. Her music was not strictly speaking to white or black audiences, or audiences of any ethnicity, it was just really well-crafted, really good music that was radio-ready. God, I really want to write about "Your Love". All of this talk about artists having crossover appeal makes me really nostalgic for the first half of the 2010s.
So, I'm just waiting to be surprised by her. Honestly, 40 is not too old, and she honestly hasn't phoned in any of her albums, though I still believe they're way too overstuffed. Bring it on, Nicki, I'm ready.