If there's one thing Nicki Minaj does not do in her MTV documentary "My Time Now," it's hold back.
The Pink Friday MC has skyrocketed to the upper echelons of the hip-hop game with a flow that swings from beastly to baby-voiced and a boldly wacky-yet-vampy persona. In the doc, the pink-wigged spitter reveals that her growing success is not just the result of her stacks of scene-stealing features, but also her insistence on being regarded as a musical force to be reckoned with.
"I put quality in what I do. I spend time and I spend energy and I spend effort and I spend everything I have, every fiber of my being, to give people quality," Minaj says in a teaser clip from the forthcoming film, hanging out in a semi-casual outfit, sporting a pale-blue T-shirt and towering Pepto-Bismol-hued wig. "So if I turn up to a photo shoot and you got a $50 clothes budget and some sliced pickles on a mother----in' board, you know what? No. I am gonna leave.
"Is that wrong? For wanting more for myself, wanting people to treat me with respect?" she continues. "But you know what? Next time, they know better. But had I accepted the pickle juice, I would be drinking pickle juice right now."
Minaj also analyzes the double standards she says plague the entertainment industry, explaining that a confident behind-the-scenes manner will often land women unfavorable and dismissive labels.
"When I am assertive, I'm a bitch. When a man is assertive, he's a boss. He bossed up. No negative connotation behind 'bossed up.' But lots of negative connotation behind being a bitch. Donald Trump can say, 'You're fired.' Let Martha Stewart run her company the same way and be the same way. [People will say] 'F---ing old evil bitch!' But Donald Trump, he gets to hang out with young bitches and have 50 different wives and just be cool. 'Oh, Donald, we love you, Donald Trump!' " Minaj quips theatrically.
The "Roman's Revenge" spitter further maintains that, to make it as a superstar, aspiring female artists are expected to juggle a superhuman amount of multitasking.
"When you're a girl, you have to be everything. You have to be dope at what you do but you have to be super sweet and you have to be sexy and you have to be this, you have to be that, and you have to be nice," she says. "It's like, 'I can't be all those things at once. I'm a human being.' "
The soliloquy is another moment in which the MC candidly provides insight, not only into her experience as a lyricist careening toward fame, but her personal views and perspectives as well. In addition to trailing the lyricist as she lays down her debut album, cameras follow the hitmaker on an emotional visit to her native Trinidad and catch Minaj as she opens up about her late grandmother.
"They're gonna meet Onika," she recently told about the doc. "Everybody sees Nicki Minaj; they're gonna meet Onika. They're gonna hear my story, and it's such an inspirational story, which I never really wanted to tell. 'Cause everyone always feels like you don't want people to know too much. But when I saw what [MTV and production company @radical.media] did, I thought, 'People need to see this.' It reminds you that everyone always feels like this is it, but there's always a light at the end of the tunnel, and I feel like that's what the doc says at the end."
Don't miss the documentary "Nicki Minaj: My Time Now," premiering Sunday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on MTV!