On this track, Minaj is the rookie, but she undoubtedly holds her own alongside Gotti, Gucci Mane, and her veteran inspiration, Trina. “I just had an epiphany, I need to go to Tiffany’s,” is the way that Minaj starts her all-star appearance on the remix of Yo Gotti’s 2009 single. 20: 5 Star Remix (Yo Gotti, featuring Gucci Mane, Trina, and Nicki Minaj) Listen to the best of Nicki Minaj on Apple Music and Spotify. As she continues to build on what came before, she consistently lives up to the claim she made with her first group, The Hood$tars, back in 2004: “I ain’t the lady to mess with.” Here are 20 essential tracks that prove why. Along with her greatness, she boasts a controversial streak that keeps grabbing headlines, but the best Nicki Minaj songs are what her reputation will rest on. Indeed, in 2017, she earned a Guinness World Record for the most Billboard Hot 100 entries by a female solo artist. She has been an endlessly creative force in hip-hop throughout the 2010s. In that spirit, what follows is a 10-song hip-hop space exploration playlist – one that spans four decades – with interplanetary lyrical references.Nicki Minajhas undoubtedly cemented her legacy as one of hip-hop’s most important artists. With those things in mind, anyone concerned with the future of space exploration might do well to consider how America’s classrooms are fitted for sound and what’s playing through the speakers.Īs poet Nikki Giovanni stated in “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea”: “To successfully go to Mars and back / You will need a song.” “This is especially true with children.”Īs stated by education professor Gloria Ladson-Billings – a pioneer and proponent of what is known as “culturally relevant pedagogy” – one effective way to inspire students is through hip-hop, one of the top music genres in the U.S. “People are not inclined to consider fields where they don’t have a role model or where they can’t find someone with whom they can identify, whether it’s by their race, gender, economic situation, educational background or something else,” Brunswick told The Conversation for this article. How we talk about outer space can influence whether children of color see themselves going in the future, argues Shelli Brunswick, chief operating officer at the Space Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for space innovation as well as diversity and inclusion.
“Even if words like ‘colonization’ have a different context off-world, on somewhere like Mars, it’s still not OK to use those narratives, because it erases the history of colonization here on our own planet,” Melvin told National Geographic in 2018. Various scholars and Black astronauts – from aspiring to retired – have called attention to worrisome language being used to describe humanity’s aims and objectives in outer space.įor instance, retired NASA astronaut Leland Melvin – known as in the Twittersphere – has pointed out how it’s problematic to talk about “colonizing” Mars. I believe our world is shaped by the language we use to describe it. Will it be for everyone? Or will it be yet another attempt at the expansion of white global dominance?
That is to say, while I know that space exploration is an inevitable part of the human journey, I also believe that it pays to remember both past and present realities here on Earth, particularly when it comes to issues of race and oppression.Īlong those lines, it’s also important to examine how space is viewed, what purpose it will serve and for whom. My view on the future of space exploration hovers somewhere between the optimism of will.i.am and the pessimism of Tribe. “We’re taking off to Mars, got the space vessels overflowing / What, you think they want us there? / All us n-gg– not going.”Īs a scholar and hip-hop artist, I know that how rap lyrics talk about space tells us as much about what is going on Earth as it does our imaginings of beyond. The group laments that “they” would prefer to “leave us where we are so they can play among the stars.”
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